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The Magic Forest is a proof of concept for voice interaction in Virtual Reality gaming.

TEAM

Aakruti Lunia and Bhavya Mulukuri.

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PROJECT OVERVIEW

The Magic Forest is an exploration of voice interaction and how it can reinforce presence in Virtual Reality. In the game, the user is trapped in a forest and in order to escape, they need to help an omnipotent magical voice find three missing items. To find these items, the user solves three riddles and completes three tasks. They find clues and solve riddles by talking to the magical voice. This game is powered by Unity and the IBM Watson API.

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As an experience designer and lead VR developer, I was responsible for building the narrative structure of the game and programming interactions. I developed the voice interaction by integrating an IBM Watson SDK into Unity's XR Interaction Toolkit.

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DEMO

IMPACT / REFLECTION

This project was a great learning experience. I had no prior experience in video games and only beginner C# programming skills, so I had to push myself technically to complete the project. I wish we were able to do more with narrative and world building, but it did take a lot of work just to get the voice interaction functional. However, the design and development process taught me a lot about establishing presence. Voice interaction is immersive by nature, but it needs to be reinforced with physical interaction to truly have impact on the user.

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Challenges

  • Poor Speech to Text recognition (e.g., “two” recognized as “to”)

  • Repeating voice commands (e.g., could not use “yes” more than once)

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Future Improvements

  • Address speech to text errors and improve voice recognition

  • Explore other IBM services like sentiment analysis to generate more sophisticated interactions

  • Develop accessibility features like captions

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