AR Game for Children in Quarantine
Tools: Figma, Reality Composer, ARKit, Swift
Type: Client AR Project
Duration: 3 months (Aug 2020 – Dec 2020)
Role: Game Design, Interaction Design, Product Strategy
Brief
Rehabilitation training for children is a long and tedious process. The child needs to spend long hours alone in the rehabilitation room for repetitive training. In addition, during the Covid-19 global pandemic, children spend long hours sitting in front of computers studying and lacking exercise.
In collaboration with University of California San Francisco (UCSF) children’s hospital, two of our interaction designers and three AR developers have designed and developed an AR game that provides a fun way to exercise for children who spend a lot of time at home doing boring rehabilitation exercises, and for children who lack exercise at home because of Covid-19.
Design Showcase
Pet Interaction
Room Decoration
Mini Game 1 – Wood Adventure
Mini Game 2 – Fruit Ninja
Mini Game 3 – Happy Hour
Design Process
Design Flow
User Research
Visiting UCSF Children’s Hospital
Meetings with Physicians
Initially, we conduct interviews with professionals including professors from UC Berkeley Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, therapists from UCSF to understand physical rehabilitation process for children. They proposed 3 use cases. Based on the use cases, I summarized several requirements for design to consider.
Due to Covid-19 pandemic, we had to suspend the cooperation with UCSF. But we soon realized that the pandemic was forcing many children to stay home, and they might face a lack of exercise, so how could they be motivated to exercise?
We conduct 5 user interviews with parents and children(age 7-11) who have stayed at home for a while to understand their needs. Here are some findings and insights.
Ideation
Although our collaboration with UCSF was temporarily suspended, we designed with these needs in mind, laying some groundwork for continued collaboration in the future. Based on the above insights and requirements, we analyzed several games that kids usually play and took 5 components into consideration: space size, duration, data collection, workout diversity, and level of excitement. The “Tracking” and “Board Game“ won.
First Try: AR Board Game
The AR board game allows the child to move around the indoor environment by rolling the dice, increasing the randomness of each game while also determining the number of steps to move. The child stepping on different squares will trigger different mini exercise games.
The disadvantage of this approach is that it requires a large indoor moving space, and also when the engineer team tried to prototype with Reality Composer, they found that the imprecision of AR localization makes the floor unstable and the visual latency creates a dissociative experience that affects children’s sense of direction. In addition, if children look down on the blocks all the time, it creates a danger of falling.
After all, we want to enhance the playability and fun of the game through projection, not detachment from reality.
Second Try: AR Pet-raising and Exercise Game
In the second attempt, we revisited our previous research insights and matrix, focusing on companionship, reward mechanisms, limited indoor space, and fostering children's creativity, and chose pet raising as the theme of the AR game.
Key Game Flow
We designed the game for 15 minutes twice a day, for a total of 30 minutes a day, to better control children's electronic screen usage time. The MVP game design includes pet interaction, room decoration and mini-game exercises.
The purpose of the game is to raise pets by earning different rewards.
Pet interaction addresses the problem of companionship, room decoration fosters creativity and exploration and interaction with the physical world, and mini-game exercise encourages children to exercise through different reward systems.
Design Decisions
1. Machine-controlled flow or human-initiated action ?
A question I often ask myself is whether we should use the machine to better operate the game flow, or whether we should let children do the exercise on their own initiative.
In the design of this exercise game, initially we designed the game itself to prompt the child to do each squatting action. Considering that some children may have difficulty with movement, and the prompting words may pose unsafe hazards for children who are not ready to do the squatting action, I changed this part of the design to a novice teaching the child how to pick up the bottle and then instead of doing the "squatting" marker, we wait for the child to initiate the action , when the action does not start for a long time, there will be animation and text prompts.
This design improvement allows the game to be designed from the child's point of view and keep them from feeling that doing the exercise is a forced thing.
2. Surprise, Surprise, Surprise!
Once we have implemented the basic features of the game, we invited some players to playtest it. In addition, I asked my mentor Alister, who works on UX design at Electronic Arts, for advice. One of the things I learned was to add randomness and surprising challenges to the game.
Randomization and surprises motivate players to keep coming back and explore more of the game. For example, for the squat game, some bottles are hidden surprise gifts for children. For the catch fruit game, catching 4 fruits in a row unlocks a new fruit.
These surprises and unanticipated encounters motivate players to keep coming back to the game.
Testing Squat Game
3. Timely feedback or immersive experience?
The mini-game "Happy Hour" is all about letting kids follow their pets' expressions and make expressions.
One of the things we considered during the game design process was whether to give kids expression feedback or focus on providing an immersive game environment without providing expression feedback?
We proposed 2 hypotheses:
Children see pet’s facial expressions, followed by their own reflections in the form of
Camara view
Filtered view (eg. Snapchat filter)
Cartoon figure view (eg. iPhone’s Memoji) 👍
Children only see the pet’s facial expressions
Also, if we choose to display feedback on a child's expressions, should we reflect their real face and how do we protect some children who for specific reasons may not be confident in their appearance and don't want to see their own face on the screen?
We did user tests to get feedback on these topics.
Prototype A: with facial feedback
Prototype B: without facial feedback
User testing results showed that players prefer games with feedback. In fact, More than 50% of students think that cartoon reflections not only provide feedbacks so users know where they did wrong but also avoid the problem of privacy concerns and limited representations. Although this may affect the immersive experience for players. The feedback provides clear cues for the user's actions.
In addition, to avoid showing the player's real face, we provided different avatars and let the user choose one that represents them.
This provides more autonomy for the player.
The Gameplay
One of the main goals of the game is to make your pet grow and make sure that your pet is happy, energetic and full of magic. Reaching exercise goals will help your pet grow.
In addition, the rewards obtained through different exercise mini-games will make your pet's energy, happiness and magic level increase. The mini-games included exercises with the lower body, upper body, and positive facial expressions.
Pet Interaction
When children are isolated at home, interacting with their pets gives them some companionship. In addition, keeping their pets healthy and happy motivates them to continue exercising.
Room decoration
Room decoration allows players to use their imagination to decorate their rooms. Players can decorate different physical spaces and save them to continue building their imaginary world. It provides a safe space for children to move around the house. Interaction is simple, just drag and drop assets into the space and move them around where needed.
Functionality demo for room decoration
