REVEREXR
Preserving the culture of Seattle's Central District through VR.
GOAL
RevereXR assigned our team to brainstorm and prototype an innovative approach to the digital preservation of musical history in the Central District of Seattle.
FINAL PRODUCT
Our final product is an educational, artifact-collecting, first-person VR scavenger hunt experience that celebrates historic buildings and musical icons from the Central District.
ROLE
UX Designer
UX Researcher
DURATION
6 months
TOOLS
Figma
Minecraft
Meta Quest VR
Miro
RESEARCH —
DESIGN & RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The research questions guided our whole project, leading us into an immersive VR experience.
ELDER INTERVIEWS
Many elders found that connections to the past were lost as families, businesses, and communities are becoming displaced.
Elders went into detail about their experiences in the Central District and discussed relevant information to our project such as historical buildings, locations, people, and memories. We used coding scheme to pick up significant patterns between the interviews. Elders mentioned many of the same notable buildings that we included in the experience.
TEACHER SURVEYS
Analyzing survey responses helped us gain a better understanding of educator's perspective on teaching practices and preferences.
Our survey consisted of 23 questions, divided into distinct categories for ease of completion. We asked questions about the educators, their current technology use, VR experience in classrooms, what they know about Seattle's Central District, and we also gathered educators’ opinions on gamified forms of learning and their effectiveness in the classroom.
TEACHER INTERVIEWS
Educators elaborated more on their survey answers and also shared the ideal educational VR game experience for their students.
We coded our qualitative data, using the method of deductive coding and applied 8 predetermined sets of categories to group the findings under. Because our interview questions were organized in a way that reflected our research topics, we were able to easily identify relevant categories to sort and evaluate our data. This allowed for a focused analysis guided by our overarching research questions, a way to establish consistency across all interviews, discovery of themes/patterns, and curation of well-informed recommendations.
KEY FINDINGS + RECOMMENDATIONS
We found 6 key findings to inform the direction of our game.
The 6 findings are accompanied by recommendations we later were able to implement in the prototyping phase of our project. We formed recommendations inspired by the findings to include in the game design as we begin our ideation phase.
IDEATION —
GAME LOGIC
Idea: A VR scavenger hunt game focusing on 8 historic buildings, musicians, and artifacts.
Our team’s ideation process consisted of brainstorming sessions guided by our previous research in order to establish our game’s logic, information architecture, and educational content/presentation. Based on our background and user research, we decided to create 8 buildings with corresponding musicians and artifacts from the Central District to highlight in our experience.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
The user flow helped us visualize exactly how the experience will play out.
Having an information architecture allowed us to think about user tasks when users are completing the scavenger hunt. This made it easier for us to organize musicians, buildings, and artifacts, as well as thinking about the user experience. This helped us think about possible features that would be helpful in enhancing usability.
EDUCATIONAL CONTENT
Users are able to walk, see, listen, and collect artifacts at each location.
Students are tasked to explore the Central District by entering 8 buildings. Each building not only contains a 1-2 minute audio biography we created of the history of the artist and this building, but contains a hidden musical artifact that must be returned to the central museum in the game’s structure.
PROTOTYPING —
SOFTWARE
We built a replica of Seattle's Central District block by block.
We began by iterating on 2D software such as Figma and Miro, then transitioned to 3D software, specifically Minecraft, to develop a fully immersive VR prototype. We chose to prototype on Minecraft for its first-person perspective and navigation, extensive building capabilities, VR support, and low learning curve. Minecraft allowed us to incorporate a variety of interactive elements, including musical objects.
GAME FEATURES
We wanted to create the most ideal prototype for student feedback.
Drawing from the recommendations we formed in our previous milestone and teacher interviews, we wanted to highlight specific features that we implemented in reference.
ADDITIONAL FEATURES
Our design decisions expanded after implementing initial features.
The following are features we implemented as we continued through the design process. These features aren’t necessarily implemented from recommendations, but more from the iterative brainstorming and prototyping stages.
USER TESTING —
METHODOLOGY
The students were really excited to play Minecraft.
After finishing our initial prototype of the scavenger hunt experience, our team was able to test it with 5 high school students from Chief Sealth International High School. We ran 15-20 minute, in-person, moderated user tests to discover both points of friction and interest, measure and collect feedback on overall usability and experience, and discover additional content/game preferences.
We allowed students to freely explore.
Each session was moderated, task-based, and ran in the sequential order of our scavenger hunt experience. We allowed the students to interpret the instructions while guiding them if needed. We set predetermined benchmarks and completion criteria. We concluded each test with post-test questions. These questions were predetermined to ensure consistency in our data analysis but we also asked questions relevant and specific to each session and the participant to gain valuable insights.
KEY FINDINGS
The students gave us so much insight from playing our scavenger hunt game.
We discovered both points of friction and interest, measure and collect feedback on overall usability and experience, and discover additional content/game preferences.
FINAL RECOMMENDATIONS —
CRUCIAL FUNCTIONS
ENHANCING FEATURES
CONVENIENT FEATURES
REFLECTION —
INNOVATION AWARD RECIPIENT
I am incredibly proud of my team for taking the risk and using Minecraft and VR to create the scavenger hunt experience. It felt rewarding to work on a project that serves our community in emphasizing the importance of history and culture. I learned so much from this experience, especailly from speaking with people in the Central District and user testing on students in our community. We received the innovation award from our department for incorporating Minecraft in our efforts to preserve culture.
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