Evolvr is a VR self-improvement hub, that can be thought of as a "healing center" and training tool.
We are very excited to announce we will be releasing this app for FREE on the Oculus Rift - users will have to register to reach our tools in the app, but we will be making this title free in order to reach more users with the powerful benefits of our modules.
Customers are tired of regular “brain training” apps and games, with Evolvr you can Self-improve with therapeutic game experiences! We worked on Pillars this week and are putting these forward:
EVOLVR_OCULUS PILLARS
1. gamification of self-improvement =
-mood & energy modulation tools are "destinations" via the central hub
-exploration with unexpected events
-user earns avatar upgrades / other assets as incentive
2. social/cultural layer =
-cultural games in destinations
-distant characters modeling behavior
-featured cultural charters teach use of tools in each destination
3. AI-assisted guidance & levels progression
-avatars give time-sensitive and "smart" responses based on user participation in modules
-destinations progress user in each culture-based game intelligently based on skills assessment
-Feedback Tracking in each destination (ex. Emotional Tracking) This helps track effectiveness of each module
Central Hub & Evolvr Features
The user will enter the central environment which connects different therapy modules. These modules have tailored experiences with audiovisual content that are natural, organic, and even abstract using principals from therapeutic gaming and music therapy.
Upon entering the pleasing and serene main environment, the user will encounter an AI-driven avatar that the user can customize, speak to (using Rift mic built-in), and get intelligent responses from. The avatar will “evolve” with the user over time. The avatar will serve as a guide or guru that can detect and direct the user toward an appropriate module based on intake questions, triggers (like time of day), and user behavior.
By utilizing the center over time, the user can monitor their emotional state, physical performance, and other health measures. Additionally, in the main environment, the user will encounter creative ways for viewing and gaining insights from the analysis of their performance data gleaned from the individual modules that they can enter/teleport into. Here too in the main hub, the user will be able to provide feedback about their experience with the modules (so the development team can push improvements and additional modules in the future to our application).
Finally, over time, the user will encounter “unexpected events” in the main healing center environment to increase the novelty of the experience and break the monotony of using the same modules over time. This can include mini-interactions involving cultural learning experiences, like coloring mandalas in VR.
Physical Rhythm/Timing & Memory Rehabilitative Module
This module has a gamification of rhythm, reaction time, and visual-motor processing skills. By engaging in several game play modes, benefits to the user may include, “increased speed and accuracy of attention and visual special abilities improved learning and memory, executive functions, problem-solving skills and creativity”. Also included increased diligence and persistence. More on this to come next week.
Emotional Modulation/Energy Tool
featured in last week'sExercise/Body Movement Education Tool
this tool will teach Tai Chi, as well as other exercises to increase body awarenessEach of our modules/ therapeutic games train the user on how to play each game, assess their skill level, and then scale difficulty according to the users skills level. Music is adaptive in nature in order to provide sensory cues to increase the user’s accuracy by serving as a reward mechanism for good performance and driver for sustained skills improvement.
Week 6
This week I began prototyping 3dof tools for the Go. I began with a saber, a wand, chopsticks, and a hammer. For my game, I want to break free of the typical controller with a laser pointer, so I am continuing these experiments until I get both a nice collection and a solution for my application. Personally, I really enjoyed the hammer and the chopsticks. This week I am going to grow this tool kit and do some play testing to see what other find satisfying.
That's it for this week. Thanks for reading!
- Ciera
Oculus ID: Ciera_Jones
Instagram/Twitter/Facebook/Medium: @cieraej
Email: ciera.jones.cj@gmail.com
Website: cierajones.com
[Previous blog post]
I think I've concluded the project, as I've been doing it, is not working out. I need to either change it, or drop out of Launchpad.
My plan with this project was to model objects with signed distance fields, render them using raymarching, and use the two together to create spaces that seem to be made of gunky dripping paint. I am using a third party Unity plugin to do the raymarch rendering. This would be joined with gameplay where you navigate small mazes, moving between compartments of different colors. The compartments would overlap in space (like in Hidden Diplomacy) so that the maze could be much larger than the VR play area.
I have hit three large problems:
1. I haven't quite found how to describe an SDF which exactly looks like the kinds of spaces I want— I can get close, but not quite. Maybe I can get around this with more work.
2. The raymarching toolkit is very bad at displaying the edges of things. When a raymarched object is viewed at a sharp glancing angle, the part viewed glancingly is often drawn transparent. It seems to be possible to work around this by tweaking the parameters of the raymarching.
3. There's a bug. This maybe I can't work around. If I try to fully control the shading— necessary to make things look even a little bit good— it can't display in VR. So for example here's what one of my test scenes looks like in the Scene pane of Unity:
Here's what it looks like in the game pane:
Everything displays black. The white flecks are the skybox, visible where you can see all the way through the wavy-shape thing. This is possibly a bug with Unity, and possibly a bug with the Raymarching toolkit, but I don't exactly know how to debug it and I don't know if I have time. The Raymarching toolkit author is helping but I haven't heard back from him in a couple of weeks. I didn't do a blog post last week.
The midpoint checkin thing is tonight. The paint-globs thing has been an interesting experiment, but if I'm going to be taking time away from my main work (which Launchpad does) I'm not sure it's what I want to be focusing on, especially if "focusing on it" means debugging malfunctioning fragment shaders.
An alternate idea I had early on, and was honestly more excited about than the raymarching idea, involved spaces made of lots of small triangles instead of raymarching. I didn't go with that idea because I thought it would be more technically difficult. But if I'm going to be fighting technical problems anyway then maybe I'd rather go with that.
I'm imagining a slightly different game than the one I've been working on. If I submit to the midpoint thing tonight, it'll be based on this alternate concept.
I think I've concluded the project, as I've been doing it, is not working out. I need to either change it, or drop out of Launchpad.
My plan with this project was to model objects with signed distance fields, render them using raymarching, and use the two together to create spaces that seem to be made of gunky dripping paint. I am using a third party Unity plugin to do the raymarch rendering. This would be joined with gameplay where you navigate small mazes, moving between compartments of different colors. The compartments would overlap in space (like in Hidden Diplomacy) so that the maze could be much larger than the VR play area.
I have hit three large problems:
1. I haven't quite found how to describe an SDF which exactly looks like the kinds of spaces I want— I can get close, but not quite. Maybe I can get around this with more work.
2. The raymarching toolkit is very bad at displaying the edges of things. When a raymarched object is viewed at a sharp glancing angle, the part viewed glancingly is often drawn transparent. It seems to be possible to work around this by tweaking the parameters of the raymarching.
3. There's a bug. This maybe I can't work around. If I try to fully control the shading— necessary to make things look even a little bit good— it can't display in VR. So for example here's what one of my test scenes looks like in the Scene pane of Unity:
Here's what it looks like in the game pane:
Everything displays black. The white flecks are the skybox, visible where you can see all the way through the wavy-shape thing. This is possibly a bug with Unity, and possibly a bug with the Raymarching toolkit, but I don't exactly know how to debug it and I don't know if I have time. The Raymarching toolkit author is helping but I haven't heard back from him in a couple of weeks. I didn't do a blog post last week.
The midpoint checkin thing is tonight. The paint-globs thing has been an interesting experiment, but if I'm going to be taking time away from my main work (which Launchpad does) I'm not sure it's what I want to be focusing on, especially if "focusing on it" means debugging malfunctioning fragment shaders.
An alternate idea I had early on, and was honestly more excited about than the raymarching idea, involved spaces made of lots of small triangles instead of raymarching. I didn't go with that idea because I thought it would be more technically difficult. But if I'm going to be fighting technical problems anyway then maybe I'd rather go with that.
I'm imagining a slightly different game than the one I've been working on. If I submit to the midpoint thing tonight, it'll be based on this alternate concept.
Major trouble logging into the forum again this week. Finally found a logged in laptop at home that worked. Not sure why I can't login to the forum at work.
Anyway Update for the week
Anyway Update for the week
Mid Check in done by Friday - so nice to be early for once.
- Budget, Proposal and Pitch deck submitted. Links to Rift and Go version of early prototypes.
Prototypes - great leaps and bounds with the Natural Language Processing and AI for our Go Fish prototype. Also the environment for Argotian proper is in Unity and became the basis for a short walkthrough video. The team is working hard on developing more mini games that use the same vocabulary and game model framework.
This weekend Siggraph was in town. We attended and pitched the Argotian project at the Business Symposium. Today, we had a visit from Oculus Start. Tomorrow, if you are in Vancouver please attend the "Future of XR" event we are hosting with special appearances from Oculus Start, Facebook VR, Unity and Intel. There are still a few tickets left on Eventbrite. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-future-of-xr-an-evening-with-vancouvers-xr-community-tickets-486105...
