Assessing the impact of interaction design on user experience in cross-platform VR games

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A company's success in the game industry is contingent on its ability to attract a significant user community. This is especially true for small studios seeking to gain name recognition and acclaim within an increasingly large and diverse marketplace, fueling an impetus to develop novel gameplay experiences. This notion, and the idea of innovating in areas like player interaction design, narrative, and art direction, is particularly relevant to indie developers, since they often have great agility and creative freedom. Besides design, another frontier of innovation is using advances in technology to pioneer new gameplay experiences. When working with new technologies, such as novel interaction modalities, care must be taken in preserving the quality and functionality of user interaction to deliver positive user experience (UX). This is the current research challenge for our partner organization, Stitch Media, a game studio with offices in London, Ontario and Toronto. Stitch is currently in the process of developing Broken Spectre, a cross-platform title spanning virtual reality (VR) and mobile devices, featuring seamless play between the two platforms. This research project aims to explore the knowledge gap in designing and implementing interaction techniques in VR titles, and understanding what makes these interactions successful. With an additional focus on how these interactions can be designed to support cross-platform compatibility with mobile devices. Designing interaction schemes within this space is notoriously complex, as there is a lack of standardization in hardware design, and core interactions such as looking around in the virtual world are vastly different to traditional platforms. Consequently, the area of interaction design for VR is wrought with challenge, and an area of exceptional interest for game developers. By investigating how VR interactions can achieve a myriad of intended gameplay and narrative goals, this project will provide a practical guideline for various core interaction design techniques in VR, offering game developers a functional approach to game interaction design relating to common gameplay patterns.