Jake Shoesmith
Design, Games and Interactive Media
THE MARS EXPERIENCE – YORKSHIRE MUSEUM UNIVERSITY PROJECT
INTRODUCTION:
For the latest UX project I have been asked by the people at The Yorkshire Museum, to develop and design an interactive media prototype feature one part of their extensive roman collection. I have chosen to do the project around the statue of Mars “The God of War”, which is situated in the entrance. I first noticed that the statue didn’t feature much information without asking a member of staff, and this is where I got the idea for an interactive experience where Mars really comes to life. The project itself would feature a model of what mars might have looked like when painted, that can be rotated and manipulated to the users enjoyment, along with this is four short animations about mars and his life in ancient Rome, that are both educational and fun.
GAME PLAY:
DESIGN APPROACH:
The design approach I took for this project was a very broad and open one. From the start I was open to many different ideas but knew I wanted to do something based in unity. My initial decision to use mars as the basis for my project was because he would be the most interesting to recreate in Maya, as a 3D model. The idea behind the 360 pan around the object actually came from a game I was playing at the time, “Resident Evil 7”, which throughout the game are random objects that can be picked up and rotated to give the user a 360 view. I liked this idea so much I decided to use it as the basis of my project, as it would allow for interaction with both a mouse and a touch screen computer.
DEVELOPMENT PROCESS:
My design process for this project moved around a lot but started with a sketch based approach. Because the project is mainly computer based, after a sketch based prototype was created, the process moved entirely on to the computer, with program such as unity and Maya. After getting ideas from a number of different museums (Yorkshire Museum, National Museum of Scotland and the Leeds City Museum) I sketched out an initial design look, and how it might work from a coding side of things.
These designs helped me shape the phase 2 of the process when I move on to the computer. As mentioned before, the main screen design was changed around here to feature a model with a look of what mars might have looked like, when he was originally painted, and this was due to user feedback. Stage 2 started off with the model design for mars, and for this I had to gather a number of different images of the mars statue to use a reference in Maya. These images helped me to create a model that resembled mars, and could then be rigged/ animated. This process was probably one of the most challenging, as I had to create a model from scratch, with enough detail to display well, but not too much that would make the computer/display run slow. One of the reasons I chose mars as the project to do in the first place was because of his complexity, and how hard he would be to translate in to the virtual 3D world well, therefore allowing me to test my skills.
Once the modelling and rigging process were complete, I was able to move on to the coding side and what factors would go in to this. While researching I found two possible paths and a way of doing what I wanted to achieve, One was to have the unity camera rotate around the object in order to give the appearance of rotation. The alternative approach and the one I went with was to write a script that on click, the object would rotate whatever way the user is dragging, resulting in this 3D spin effect that I wanted for the project. Once the main screen was finished it was as simple as creating some background props and boxes for the user to click on, that would trigger the other scenes.
