Tic Tac Toe XR
I'm taking the big leap into XR Design and development. I am taking learning XR quite seriously. I've been spending a ton of time reading books like: Brave NUI World and taking a class How to Design for AR/VR
Good Taste; Bad Skills
While working though my VR/AR Design course I started to think really big on what ideas that were in that sweet spot of feasible viable and desirable. Unfortunately, I realized that my process needs to be more organic, refined, and iterative. And what I mean by that is, with the Adjacent Possible Theory of my current skill set, paired with my ambitious desires to not only design but make polished prototypes, made itself apparent, that I needed to slow my pace because I'm just not good enough yet; my tastes outweighs my skills. Concepts of Narrative and how to make an interaction "fun" to add presence and immersion are just going to slow down my progress. I need to work on my Chops. It's going to be a slow burn by here was my original dumb sketch and you can see how it morphed into simple tic tac toe.
The Simplest Games
The goal here was to think of the simplest games that I can transfer over to XR. Tic Tac Toe is the first game that jumped into my head. I think the benefit of Tic Tac Toe are as follows: the tactile interaction of drawing an X or O. The sheer simplicity of the game allows me to focus on completing a full game in a short amount of time. The simplicity allows me to warm up and work up to bigger ideas.
“Listen, you can't polish a turd”
Geoffrey Stokes' 1976 book, Star-Making Machinery said, "Listen, you can't polish a turd" and pretty much the expectation from my work are going to be very turd-like. That said, while you cannot polish a turd you can put decorations around it. I want this project to illustrate some details that are nuanced and thoughtful. I'm not confident I'll hit that mark but I'd like to focus on perhaps motion design, ui, ux, maybe some architecture and best practices.
"Jumping the Shark"
One of the final episodes of Happy Days was so iconic that 50 years later we still use the term "Jumping the shark". "Jumping the shark" is used to argue that a creative outlet or work appears to be making a misguided attempt at generating new attention. Traversing down the decision tree of creativity at some point I always start to "jump the shark". For me I like getting to this wacky point. After-which I then look backwards and trim the choices that make it feel too wacky. I like getting lost in the process. I like doodling ideas that were larger than I could achieve. Tic-tac-toe might seem banal but how I got here was just weird. Here is a sketch.
Shapes XR - Prototype
This is a loose prototype that I made in Shapes XR w/ Oculus Quest 2. It's not too difficult but it kind of outlined quite a bit of the Visual design and Interaction Design. Things I wish I would go back and consider more is user feedback. I'd like to get a working environment, hand tracking in the system before I really start going further.
Hand Tracking & Pass through API
I really want to give hand tracking a shot for this experience. It is such a simple example of a game and therefore a great opportunity to attempt to use some of the more experimental APIs.
Pattern Recognition
One approach to detecting if the user draws an X or a O is using Pattern Recognition. The best package I've found for this is https://github.com/DaVikingCode/PDollar-Unity I've tried it out before the problem with it is that it doesn't work that well in 3D. But could be good enough so I'll try it.
Work In Progress
Hello future reader. I'm writing this post as you read. At some point I will add a prototype to this project. but until then, I hope you learned a bit about me.