Week 2.
The second week of the Sony Talent League was for Team Mapo all about story. Before we were able to move on to focus on the aesthetics of our interactive VR story, like visual development, background or character designs, we wanted to have a clear and working story, which we can work with. So we spent a lot of time coming up with concepts and putting them on paper, discussing them with each other and solving problems that might have come up. 
An open question that needed to be answered first was if we rather aim for a more educational or a more entertaining story. So after debating about it we decided to go more the entertaining way and use sign language as the mechanics of the story. 

Andrey using "Hand Tracking".

 

Out of many ideas that we had written, three especially caught our attention. And out of those three there was one we both liked and that was very interesting, but still not too ambitious for the two of us to fulfill within the upcoming weeks. 
It is the story of an old man and his mountain. Set in an alpine environment we (the viewer/player) encounter an old deaf man and subsequently are being taught the basics of sign language. We also learn more about the mysterious background of this character and why we are the chosen one, who were meant to meet him. 

Besides that, last week we continued doing research about ASL (american sign language), the language we want to use in our interactive story. Not only is it important for us to understand the basics, if we want to teach them to the viewers later on, but also because some signs bring challenges in combination with the headset we are using (Meta Quest 2). Since there are many signs that include the hand touching the head, which is not possible to be detected by the four cameras on the front of the headset, we decided to only focus on signs that don’t require the head for now. 

Sebastian during the Kick-Off presentation explaining some challanges.


Concept for the in-game learning.

We also kept working on the development of the interactive part of the story. We use Unity as the game engine and we’re testing two SDKs at the moment. With Oculus Interaction SDK for hand shape recognition and PDollar Point-Cloud Gesture Recognizer for gesture recognition we potentially can track most hand signs that are in the field of view of the cameras. 

Successful test for the Hand Shape Recognition.

At the end of the week, we started to work on first drafts for the character design, which we will continue during the next week. We are excited to move on!

Team Mapo signing "Thank You" and "Goodbye".