World-in-Miniature Games Collection

Assigned Human-Computer Interaction Computer Science Games Engineering Bachelor Master Project Thesis No Affiliation Games Research Lab

Background

Recently, we published a scientific paper on World-in-Miniature navigation in VR, or WiM. Immersed in VR, the user holds a “copy of the world” in his/her hand and points at a location to teleport to. The UI design of WiM can be rather involved and consider various details, e.g. one can only show part of the whole world and allow the user to “scroll” to select the part that (s)he wants to go, one can implement transparent walls or “holes” in walls to position one’s avatar inside of buildings, etc. In said paper, we integrated the best practice of WiM research, closed some gaps and innovated some aspects to arrive at a comprehensive, functional WiM system.

Task

In this work, you would be familiarizing yourself with the given WiM implementation. Next you would set out to innovate and design various games this navigation technique can support. Concrete (mini-)games might entail searching large spaces and collecting some items, rushing through a path of destinations to beat the clock or an adversary, … Mods could make specific WiM UI aspects accessible under certain circumstances (think, e.g., of the star in Super Mario), in addition to scrolling across one world, the WiM interface could also allow to select one of numerous potential target worlds to begin with, …

While trying out various mechanics and exploring their gaming potential, you might, at the same time, (a) improve WiM navigation by refining various interaction tasks, by introducing new features, or by identifying and defining best practice usage patterns. You might (b) be able to outline ideal use cases, infer their commonalities, and propose further improvements of WiM navigation.

Literature

Truman, S., & von Mammen, S. (2020, September). An integrated design of world-in-miniature navigation in virtual reality. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (pp. 1-9).

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3402942.3402994?casa_token=88PFyskD8SYAAAAA:_jLP-ge2Uovzt1OoFq1BrCZoCDsRrEZ6cc5_vIHY3Rqbr9OPXPMh8AAfjJSWclXCkEX0RC9RJec

Contact Persons at the University Würzburg