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

一家公司在游戏行业的成功取决于它吸引大量用户社区的能力。对于寻求在日益庞大和多样化的市场中获得知名度和赞誉的小型制片厂来说，情况尤其如此，这推动了开发新颖游戏体验的动力。这一概念，以及在玩家交互设计、叙事和艺术指导等领域进行创新的想法，与独立开发人员尤其相关，因为他们通常具有极大的敏捷性和创作自由。除了设计，创新的另一个前沿是利用技术的进步来开拓新的游戏体验。在使用新技术时，如新颖的交互模式，必须注意保持用户交互的质量和功能，以提供积极的用户体验(UX)。这是我们的合作伙伴组织Stitch Media目前面临的研究挑战，Stitch Media是一家在伦敦、安大略省和多伦多设有办事处的游戏工作室。斯蒂奇目前正在开发一款跨越虚拟现实(VR)和移动设备的跨平台游戏Breaked Spectre，以两个平台之间的无缝游戏为特色。这项研究项目旨在探索在设计和实施VR游戏中的互动技术方面的知识差距，并了解这些互动成功的原因。另一个重点是如何将这些交互设计为支持与移动设备的跨平台兼容性。在这个空间内设计交互方案是出了名的复杂，因为硬件设计缺乏标准化，而且核心交互，如在虚拟世界中环顾四周，与传统平台有很大不同。因此，VR的交互设计领域充满了挑战，也是游戏开发人员特别感兴趣的领域。通过研究VR交互如何实现无数预期的游戏和叙事目标，该项目将为VR中的各种核心交互设计技术提供实用指南，为游戏开发人员提供与常见游戏模式相关的游戏交互设计的功能方法。

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.