This week, Studio Mar focused on designing and developing Vuforia markers for use in our game, while continuing work on the headsets and playable prototype.

Markers

Sketches of marker design concepts by Adrienne Cassel.

We discussed a few different designs for markers: the origin marker, which represents the center and flat plane of the play space; the palette marker, which allows the player to select brush colors and textures; and the paintbrush marker, which the player uses to draw the line in 3D space.

3D Markers

We tested Vuforia’s 3D Object tracking to see if a 3D marker is a viable option for the origin and paintbrush markers. We want a 3D marker to be accessible by anyone who plays the game, and so looked into objects that could be printed out and put together. Vuforia needs multiple points to recognize a specific object, so a complex 3D printed object works better than a folded paper shape. We are also testing Vuforia’s cube recognition.

We hope that a 3D origin marker will be easier to track as players walk around it, and that a 3D paintbrush marker will support natural drawing in 3D space (by rotating and twisting the marker).

Paintbrush Controllers

We discussed possible solutions to a problem we discovered last week–how to turn the “painting” on or off without changing the paintbrush marker, which would require re-tracking. We came up with two different solutions: a gaze-based on/off button in the virtual UI, and an on/off button on a physical handheld controller. To that end, we hope to acquire some Google Daydream controllers to use with our Pixels, since we believe the handheld controller is a better design solution than the gaze-based UI.

Improved prototype

Last week we were able to start drawing in 3D space using Vuforia and 2D markers. This week we added the ability to draw with multiple strokes–whenever the software stops tracking the paintbrush marker, like if the paper is turned over or goes offscreen, it stops drawing the line. When the marker is re-tracked, it treats it as a new line. The brush texture demonstrated above is “Rainbow” from the Tilt Brush SDK, edited to be all red.

We also have begun working on adding multiplayer to the prototype, so that multiple people can view the same drawings at the same time.

Headset

We tested the three-strap headset design and added foam padding to our modified Google Cardboard to make it more comfortable to wear.

next Week

Next week is our prototype presentation! We hope to have working versions of the headset and markers, with designs that we plan on moving forward with for the rest of development. That way, our guests can have an experience as close to the final game as possible.

Keep checking back here for more updates on Studio Mar!