Now that i have managed to get most of the first difficulty working and in the Unity project fully playable I felt happy to start setting up the other difficulties for the project. The easy difficulty acted as a great framework where i could replicate what I had already created and scripted in unity but in a great scale for the other sections
Medium Difficulty
For the medium difficulty based on my script the user will need to create a four word sentence and so there are now four placeholders on the table in front of the player. For some added difficulty four new words have also been added to float around the player and the speed has also moderately been increased to add a slight sense of speed to the situation to make it more difficulty for the player to spot and grab the words quickly. This of course is how i want the mind to represent some of the difficulty if they are put into situations they find difficult to speak with.
Hard Difficulty
The hard difficulty is quite a sudden jump compared to the easy and medium difficulty with the user now having to create a six word sentence. There are now twenty four different words floating around the user and spinning at a pretty fast rate that will be quite difficulty for the user to find and grab the words within the time that the audio is becoming far more intense.
Tutorial (Starting Area)
One thing that I also need is the tutorial area that the player can stand in for as long as they want before starting the full experience. I created this with only the word ‘Hello’ floating around the player so this was very simple to create based on what I had made previously for the easy difficulty.
How to End the experience
This concept for a virtual reality experience could technically go on for a long time if you really wanted it to to have a massive mind full of different words and large sentence and typographic structures to create in a given time. However this experience needs to be short and so i feel that this could be ended in a way that I have personally not been able to finish conversations due to the anxiety and social mobility of certain conversations and situations.
It was suggested to me that the last word that the user needs to place could just never snap in place and it is impossible for the user to finish the sentence. This is a good representation of how difficulty it can sometimes be for us to speak and how we put ourselves in a corner and cant finish our sentences. This can carry on for a short while and eventually fade out over time leaving the player in a dark space showing that the player has given up trying to speak. A short piece of text can then be shown at the end of the experience explaining the situation and perhaps a way of showing awareness and a way of understanding how some people struggle with speaking.
“Stuttering is a speech disorder in which the flow of speech is disrupted by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words, or phrases as well as involuntary silent pauses or blocks in which the person who stutters is unable to produce sound. Almost 70 million people worldwide stutter , under 1% of the worlds population with some receiving therapy but there is no cure for the disorder at present”
“Patience and understanding without judgement can show a small act of kindness in someones day”
The Ethics of this experience
I felt that this experience might have some ethical challenges due to the somewhat sensitive subject matter of what i am conveying to the user. While i personally have a stutter, i know that people deal with speech impediments in very different ways and some of course have different variations and intensities of speech disorders. So i want to add a disclaimer at the start of the experience to explain to the user what this is and how it is a abstract work of fiction:
Disclaimer – “The following is a work of fiction and based on the personal interpretation of one individual and should not be taken as a definitive representation of the human mind or a speech impediment such as a Stutter. Each person can experience a Stutter in many different ways and different levels of severity in different situations and stages of life.”