For our last progress show, we were using a Kinect and Unity to show water particles, and when you moved like the particles were moving, it created heat and caused evaporation. After this, we took out the Kinect and decided to use full embodiment within VR, using trackers to track your movement and implementing an AI that picks up those movements, so that we can teach specific theories such as how a hurricane forms through embodied movements.

With this AI and theory on embodied movements, we thought the best way to implement this was into a VR game. World Zero – Chapter One is our latest working demo for our educational game experience.

We created a full 3D world that people could navigate and explore. Scattered around the Island there are several objects. Movements you can pick up and learn, collectibles that add some extra rewards to the game but also tasks you might need to complete with the help of movements you have learnt before. Different portals also teleport you to different scenes of the world to complete different task and continue your learning adventure.

All the feedback we have received was very positive. People really engaged with the world and the experience and generally liked navigating and exploring the environments looking for movements to learn and objects to collect.  

Over the summer we are planning of expanding the world even more and refining all the visual aspects of it to make it look even more appealing. We are also planning on reinforcing the current narrative by building into the game a story based on Greek gods and narratives.. We have already created different 3D sculpted characters to insert as characters and developed further tasks to implement into the game world we have already created.