The goal of the Visual Search Project was to create a game that tested a player’s mindset when differentiating between targets and non-targets. I was tasked with developing the 3D Room in VR while the other members used their tools to measure the player’s movements in real time.

Taking into account that anyone could play the game, I set it in only one room so users unfamiliar with VR did not lose due to teleporting or other mentally straining mechanics. As our project was associated with the military, I thought it would be fun to collect bullets, which were not only easily to scatter but also difficult to differentiate. They would pick up a gun and collect all the target bullets in the room, while the distractor bullets would not be collected.

Since we were using a big VR environment, I had to block off the rest of the building by fading it out. I also resized the distance of the environment so that players would not step beyond the visibility of the VR sensors in the Mobi Lab. This way, the player’s image and the physical reality of the lab’s dimensions remained constant, and made it easier for future lab experimenters to stop the player without knowing what was happening inside the game. As you can see on the photo above, I scattered bullets around visible locations in the room. I had two types of distractor bullets (black and green tip) and one type of target bullet (blue tip). Players would be tasked to find about 30 target bullets to complete the game.