Abel Paguyo II

An introductory VR project for Google Cardboard which allowed a player to simulate the experience of crossing a street safely, which is later adopted into a startup known as BehaviorMe.

First VR Project

Around 2015 was when I put my foot in the door in order to learn VR development. It was a small extracurricular club known as GatorVR which offered projects for members and newcomers to collaborate and work on. I joined a small team of mostly newcomers, and so we decided to chase after a potential education approach on top of being scalable, which is where we got the idea of Street Crossing VR.

Designing for the platform

Keeping the scope of available interactions in mind, Google Cardboard could let players do two things:

Look around in 360 degrees
Gaze at objects with a static reticle
Press a button

With a pretty limited basis of interactions, it was actually a perfect fit that anyone could then pick up the VR experience, look around, and cross a street with a button. However, the point of the experience is to teach users when to cross a street safely, therefore we designed guidelines that essentially told the player in VR the proper neccessary steps to crossing a street such as:

Find good crossing locations
Look both ways before crossing the street
Watch for turning traffic

Simple yet effective, and also affordable (and recyclable)

Gameplay

The first level is a simple tutorial meant to help the user adapt to gazing in VR, letting them freely look around the environment without throwing them suddenly in the middle of a city. This is why the first level has no cars in the first place, and simply instructs the user how to cross the street with the combination of gazing at a crossing marker, as well as a button press. The next few levels however, will start to add cars, albeit slow, and the complexity of the crosswalk and situation should further increase in order to provide the user with as much crosswalking simulations as possible.

I know I get nervous when I see a cop car (and I still do)

Working with BehaviorMe

BehaviorMe is a startup company in Gainesville that got into contact with us after we had the final demo to wrap up the semester. BehaviorMe is a company that provides therapists the tools they need to deliver effective interventions using XR technology. One of the founders took interest in our project and offered us to a form of partnership that eventually turned into internships to keep on developing the Street Crossing VR experience as part of their library of experiences to deliver. We eventually reformed the project in order to account for scalability and ease of customization, as well as changing platforms from Google Cardboard into Google Daydream (which uses a single controller, compared to a singular button).

More distinct difficulty jumps as well as more levels

Final Thoughts

This was essentially, my first adventure within VR development, and it was a long ride that had its ups and downs. Special thanks for the many mentors I ran into who patiently introduced and taught me Unity, and also BehaviorMe, for partnering with us which led to a bigger opportunity for us to develop in VR. Looking forward to see where my next adventure starts from here!

Fall 2017 - BehaviorMe