A Collaborative VR Game Proposal

By Julian Yu-Chung Chen, Fall 2005

Assignment Description

Definition

To look at the requirement of the game. I will look at it as "collaborative", "virtual reality" and "game". First I will dig in the meaning of these three characteristics individually and in the reverse order! And putting them together, I will introduce what the hardware, software, human resource requirements and what the users' experience will be.

Game

Everybody likes to play games. Why? Because playing games is fun. And the most important element of a game is 'FUN'. Just as Linus Torvalds and other psychologists[] said, there are three stages in the human being evolution, the first stage is to survive, the second stage is to achive some social goals/status and the third stage is to have fun! Things like television, celluar phone and the development of Linux are all examples of it.

Only one fun game can attract a user to stay with and keep coming back to the game. What factors could let a game player feel fun? According to the research[], the "funativity" can basically be categoried into three type (especially in games):

Also in the investigation poll of most gamers, we can find that what they would like to have most in the games. The top four are, "realistic graphics", "excitement", "interactivity", and "unpredictability". So in the collaborative VR game I am going to propose, it will try to fulfill all these three ideas.

Virtual Reality

Why using virtual reality? One obvious reason is to provide the whole new gaming experience! Take the prototype of CAVE version of id Software's Quake III Arena[] for example, the gaming setup and display looks like this:

Image from Paul Rajlich: http://www.visbox.com/cq3a/

With hardware setup like this, the gaming experience is never the same as the desktop. Using VR as the interface between player and the gaming world content will take the "physical fun" element to the next level, the player now can not only accomplish somthing in the game, and he has to actually move his physical body to do it. This will make it like a real life experience. Using VR also corresponds to two of the most wanted features from the gamers, "realistic graphics" and "interactivity". Being in the VR device would make player feel immersive in the world of the game. With nowadays software development, using software to simulate the real world physical system is never a impossible mission. Libraries like "Open Dynamics Engine"[] can give player more interactive feedback about the actions he/she puts in the virtual world.

But if everything in the gaming environment is all virtual, as the user spend more time in the system, things will get more and more predictable. Soon the player can learn the pattern of how computer or AI works and figure out a way that always beat the computer. The user will get bored soon unless the content of the game is updating along with time. One thing now a lot of game company do is making the game software a multiple player version. This also implies an online multiple 'human' player mode, which will lead us to the next key topic, "collaboration".

Collaborative

People are colletive animals. From technologies these years we can find that a lot of technologies took off based on one persion's need and huger to connect to rest of the world. Evidient examples are Email, celluar phones, and bloggers.

Playing with real humans is always more challenging and hence more fun than play by yourself with computers. Since we were kids, we always prefer playing with other kids on the same block. It took IBM and all the chess researchers decades to invent "Deep Blue" to beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov[]. This means in the sense of competition with other players in the game.

Aside from the perspective of compeition, with proper game(content) design, the players in the game could also be required to cooperate with each other to finish a specific task. Or to achieve some task that is so difficult that if one player wants to do that, it will comsume him just too much time.

So these are the reasons that multiplayer online role-playing games(MMORPG) like "World of Warcraft", are so popular among gamers. I think human's unpredictable factor is yet another reason that will make gamers feel enjoyable. If you ever got into these games, you will find that there are always players gathering up as teams or even guilds. Some guilds are even have made "laws" asking partipatations to obey. The whole online gaming world is almost just like a real world!

Image from http://data.blogg.de/5559/images/crowd.jpg


User Experience

In our collaboration VR game, we will try to not only immersive the user/player into the virtual world we created. We will also try to provide the user a key to bridge the virtual world and the real world in a more direct and intiuitive way. The background story of the game will be based on popular first person shooting game like Quake[] mentioned above, with another game, Myst[]'s puzzle solving element.

Image from Myst 1: http://www.myst.com/myst_screenshots.html Image from Myst IV: http://www.mystworlds.com/us/screenshots_myst5.php

The user will first pay "$10" to be allow to play the game. In entering the game, the player will have a rough scan of his face (through images), and an estimation of his height and 'width(?!)' using computer vision techniques, as a metric to generate proper avatar representative in the virtual world. Next thing is role picking. The player can either 1. choose by himself/herself what kind of characters that he/she would like to play or 2. or through a simple mind test. The user can point to answers of several questions in the VR environment, and the system will choose 'proper' character for him/her. This will went through for only one time, all the user's playing status data and character data will be saved to a memory, it could be a USB thumb drive or a RFID that belongs to the player (since things like USB thumb drive is so cheap now, application like this might need only 32MB or even less storage size). We will call this device "VR ID". So when the user come back to play the game again, he/she will not to went through the whole setup again.

The user can choose to do pure physical shooting NPC monsters to survive and get high scoring as the role of fighter. Then in this mode, the joystick will produce vibration when the player fires to simulate the vibration of guns.

Image from Paul Rajlich: http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/caveQuake/

Or the user can also solving puzzles provided by the system. Those who focus on puzzle-solving are called 'wiz'. With each puzzle solved the user can gain scores and also get more powerful weapons, which can cast more powerful attacks or generate shields to prevent himself/herself being shot by others for a period of time.

With VR and collaborative capabilities, the puzzles we can put into this environment will not be limited to single person puzzles like those of Myst games. Some puzzles will need multiple users interactively cooperating together to solve it, so all related participators can gain a substional amount of energies to power up the users' heavy weapon or protective gadgets like shield generators.

So why would the user like to come back, pay and play again? We are leveraging the concept of buzz idea social networking. Along the stereo glass the user wear, it will also equipped with a microphone to record the user's voice. The voice can be used to talk to other players in the game. And the voice is also feed into the workstation in each "Platform Access Location". The workstation will do realtime voice recognition, and classfy according to keywords in pre-defined vocabulary library. If the player's voice content matches some keyword above one threadshold frequency, a visual tag will be put on user's avatar in the virtual world. So that other players can easily identify people who are sharing some common interests as they are. An example scenerio would be like what "The Sims"[] has status and emotion icons above player or NPC's avatars.

Images from: http://www.sg.hu/kep/2004_09/0920thesimsbemutatoketto22.jpg, Sims screenshot

And since the player can talk to each other, the players could be able to communicate and form teams and community easily in the virtual environment. In each time he/she entering the game, the player is also provided with the option whether he/she wants to answer some questionaire, so that the play time could be extended. With these information (or use Google's personal information, if Google is ever going to relase them ;)), the system can put some tags or signs on the avators in the virtual environment. In this case the players in the virtual environment can then easily identify those who are 'the same kind' of persons as they are, which will make forming teams and community easier.

Hardware and Software Requirements

The Distributed Server Platform

The whole platform is going to be distributed. At the first stage, the world will be partitioned according to the deployment of the "Platform Access Locations". We will need to setup the server platform with the following hardware:

You might not need to use supercomputer scale server system. But with the number of user grows, the architecture of the server system has to be scalable.

Image from Virginia Tech System X: http://www.tcf.vt.edu/systemX.html

Approximate cost: $500,000

Design and Planning Center

To help the moderator, game designer, and planner to monitor and design new components of the virtual world, using a high-resolution display wall could help all these people gather together (in the real world) to discuss and place modifications into the virtual world.

High-resolution display

Image from EVL: http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/glvf/a.html

Image from EVL: http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/sage/gallery.php

Approximate cost: $30,000 to $60,000

Platform Access Locations

Due to using HMD cannot really see the outside(real) world, so we might need to limited the area of users' activities for safety reasons, we will use full-fledge CAVE or Cwall in the platform access location. In the case of Cwall, the required equipments are: Approximately cost: $30,000.

For CAVE-like virtual environment setup, nowadays we are not limited to Silicon Graphics based supercomputers or workstations. We can use commodity hardware components as Cwall does. (Take 4-walls, front, right, left and ground for example)

And since the player should be able to clearly hear and identify other players' talking voice, so a surround acoustic system is required for both Cwall and CAVE-like environment setup. The workstation system should be able to generate clear positional acoustic voices and effects depending on the information of other players' positions in the virtual world.

Approximate cost: $ 150,000.

Image from Paul Rajlich: http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/caveQuake/

For the software side, some program might need to be rewritten. There are some opensource middleware like Chromium and Electro available. And we must develop the game platform based on these already-done software stack or porting.

For each "Platform Access Location", personnels required would be,

Initial idea and sketch drawings

References:

  1. cs528: Virtual Reality, Andy Johnson's course material
  2. cs426: Video Game Design and Programming, Jason Leigh's course material
  3. Paul Rajlich's Cave Quake III Arena
  4. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
  5. The Making of a Chess Machine
  6. Wikipedia - World of Warcraft
  7. Wikipedia - The Sims
  8. Chromium
  9. Non-planar Tilesort Rendering
  10. Electro
Julian Yu-Chung Chen
Last modified: Tue Dec 6 14:54:20 CST 2005