Updated to the Apartment Layout
After looking at the apartment further i decided to try some further alternative layouts by looking at some different apartment floorplans online to see if i could create something a bit different and perhaps more interesting to move around and navigate for the player.
Final Developments to the first user research iteration
To put together the user research iteration all of the rooms were divided the rooms amongst the group which included Lin creating the 1980s apartment
After all of the different environments were merged into one singular scene I then looked into how we can arrange this layout and the best way to switch between these scenes for the user testing. To avoid any issues with the user being able to see the other buildings outside the windows I decided to stack each one on top of one another so it wouldn’t be possible to see the other flats in the environment. This would hopefully not be too distracting in the environments.
As you can see from the image below the four XR rigs were then put in place so that the user would always start in the same position within each environment. The only difference between the XR rigs is the Y coordinate and each rig being labelled and specified for that certain apartment or time period and so we can turn on and off the different rigs as and when we please. For the research test we simply planned on showing the users the different environments and then getting their feedback on each one and also showing them the environments in a random order and not chronological so hopefully this wouldn’t influence there answers.
Finding test participants
After discussing with our teachers how we should go about this first user research test we decided that it would be best not to test too many participants and so we settled on finding up to six different users. Ideally for the test it would have been more beneficial to get users of different ages brackets but due to time constraints and also the demographic that we can get hold of. So for the actual test we were able to assemble six other people that were aged between 22-26 to look at the environments.
Overall it was great to see how different the users perceive environments but it is also a shame that these users will not have viewed a 1980s environment first hand compared to those who would have been older. However it is also interesting to see how users interpret the environments and see what there idea of an older or newer apartment would be.
Each participant was tested over the course of a week with some being tested and using the VR headset within some of the university classrooms as LCC while some others were tested at their homes using a Oculus Rift S or Oculus Quest 2 headset and each person was then also asked to fill out our demographic questionnaire and also our research iteration questionnaire.
Analysing Test Results
After we had completed all of the tests with six different individuals we were able to analyse there results and answers and overall it was quite interesting to see what each person thought each environment time period was and also there general opinions of the layout, furnishings and decorations of the apartments.
Overall for the first question we had quite a positive result in which nearly everyone thought that Environment A was the 1980s, Environment B was the Future, Environment C was the 1990s and the only stand out was some mixed results in which Environment D was thought to mostly be the 2020s but had a couple answers which were not matching. However The results were mostly positive and what we wanted and so we would not need to make that many major changes to the environments in the terms of the time periods.
Luckily all users had noticed differences in the environment which overall does show that they care about their surroundings and the differences that they see. Most of the users noticed more obvious changes such as technology, colours and general furnishings that had moved around or were different styles.
However there were some elements which users noticed felt or seemed out of place in the environments such as certain aspects they believed to be historically incorrect or didn’t match the surrounds which is feedback we can definitely incorporate into improving our environments.