Muru in Wonderland
An Immersive Video Tour with Gameful Character Interaction for Children
2015 - 2016 / Korea Culture Technology Institute
Sung-A Jang - Interaction Design & Development
Kyouseok Baik - Planning & Story Design
Retro Media - Video Production & Character Modeling
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Muru in Wonderland effectively combines 360-degree real-world footage of places in Gwangju with real-time 3D interaction with a virtual character. It transformed an immersive video tour into a rich interactive experience for children by introducing a virtual character in its scenes that children could physically touch and playfully engage with their hands.
Participants are lured into a game of hide and seek, and encouraged to find and grab or poke Muru with their hands. The playful and robust character interaction is designed to draw children into the world the character inhabits and encourage spatial exploration. Its gameful design proved to be effective in motivating children to fully engage with the video-based content and make new discoveries. It explores the potential of interactive, immersive video for VR to expand ways of experiencing video-based content and also create novel experiences that support creative engagement and further fuse the physical with the virtual.
2016 Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) Exhibition
S. Jang, K. Baik, and K. Ko. "Muru in Wonderland: An Immersive Video Tour with Gameful Character Interaction for Children." In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems, pp. 173-176, Jun. 2016. [PDF}
Background & Approach
Immersive video of real-world sites + virtual character interaction scenarios + narration
Interactivity that matched the immersive and continuous nature of the content
A fun, playful element that excites the children’s curiosity and gets them to search and explore the sites for themselves
A virtual character that could act as a guide to the city and help them explore
A dynamic, captivating guide that gets users to physically engage with the content and make their own discoveries, as opposed to a generic museum-type docent that directs people from one site to another and stops to give long, boring explanations
Creative Approach: UX Design
The character Muru appears as a part of the scenes, to further draw the children into its world. Children were allowed to use their hands to interact with the character within its environment. Narration was to prompt children into taking action and also to thread the various scenes together into one cohesive narrative. We chose to use hand movement and gesture based interactions, since we felt that hand-based contact and manipulation was the most natural and intuitive form of interaction for children and adults alike. It is also immediate, fluid and continuous, which we felt was important to sustain the children’s attention.
Character Design
Character Design: Our objective was to create a fun-loving, approachable character that represented the spirit of Gwangju (for children). Muru’s character is based on river otters, a playful, affable animal and one of the main species that inhabit the Gwangju Lake. Muru’s signature look was designed by a visual artist in 2D, and its 3D model was made based on the artist’s drawings. The character animations show Muru in basic poses and various states of action such as walking, running, flying, and hiding. Custom sound clips were also designed for every status and action.
Interaction Design
To playfully engage the children, the character interactions are structured in the form of a game of hide and seek. Children are challenged in each scene to first find Muru then physically interact with it using their hands. When users reach to either grab or poke Muru, the otter playfully reacts and escapes their grasp in various ways. The interaction gets incrementally difficult with each successive scene. For instance, in this scene the otter stays in the center and jumps when users try to grab it; in the later scenes the otter appears in the peripheries and teleports itself or runs away to hide in other places when users attempt to catch it. Its game-like design is intended to motivate participation and make the interactions more fun and rewarding.
A skeletal hand model appears whenever hands come within the user’s view. Hand movement-based interactions are used to support natural and intuitive play and lets children physically connect with the space. The character essentially functioned as an entry point to the virtual world, which connected the user’s sense of presence to the video-based virtual space.
Implementation
Exhibition
Conclusions & Future Work
Rich interactive experience that commanded attention and encouraged playful exploration, engagement, and discoveries
Intuitive spatial interaction for both children and adults
Showed potential for creative interaction with video-based content
Blurring boundaries between the physical and the virtual
Potential for interactive storytelling
Achieving a balance between content appreciation and playful interaction
The work was showcased in the Glocal Content Fair 2015. Hundreds of children were able to experience the work for three consecutive days.
Two systems were installed within the booth, and parents and kids stood in line to wait for their turn while they watched others play. There was a guide to help kids with the HMD and earphones, and parents were able to see their kids play on the bigger screens.
The prototype was an overall success in attracting children’s interest and making them active participants in the work. With proper guidance, most children showed instant ease and intuitive command of the interaction. The interactivity heightened the immersion for children and gave them a sense of drive and direction. Many were bursting with energy and excitable, and some even jumped up from their chairs and walked to and fro to chase Muru.
Although there was no scores to measure their performance, the children were completely immersed and persistent in their chase. Siblings and friends competed against each other and compared how they did according to how adept they were in navigating the space and engaging the character.
The experience was best suited for children ages 8 and up, who were big enough to withstand the weight and heat of the HMD, and had big enough hands for robust hand tracking. The motion sensor’s limitations constrained how far and fast the children could move their hands. With the help of the guides, the children quickly learned how to better control their hand movements for effective tracking.