Project-VRTouchMuseum

VR Touch Museum

Virtual Reality and the Touch Experience at the Museum

TEAM

Yuchen Zhao

MY JOB

Programming , Prototyping, Designing

TOOLS

HTC VIVE, Leap Motion,Unity3D, Maya, Structure Sensor

DELIVERABLES

Project, Paper

INSTRUCTOR

Prof.Maurizio Forte
Prof.Regis Kopper

PURPOSE

Project for Master Degree

DURATION

July 2017- Jan. 2018

CATEGORY

AR/VR, Interaction Design

AFFILIATION

Duke University

PRESENTATIONS\AWARDS

2018 IEEE VR 🌐

• IDEA

The Virtual Reality (VR) Touch museum is an experimental museum designed to challenge the way that traditional museums  display items and facilitate learning. As indicated in the name, two crucial features are included in such museums: Virtual Reality, and the sense of touch. This means that VR touch museums will be based on Virtual Reality that incorporates real touch corresponding to the virtual world. The hope is that in this new kind of museum, visitors could not only see the artifact that is conventionally displayed in a modern museum building, but also enter into a space where this artifact is presented in the context of its original setting. In addition to the immersive VR experience, visitors can obtain a real feeling of the artifact’s material by touching a physical replica and gaining a strong feeling of “presence”. Therefore, by combining both the virtual and the real world, visitors can be immersed into a historical context and thereby strengthen their memory of the content while visiting the virtual museum.

• KEY FEATURES

✅  Virtual Reality

✅  Touch Experience

✅  Interaction Design

✅  3D Modeling

• DESIGN OUTCOME

• DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS

💡 How to add touch experience into VR? 

💡 How to integrate the virtual world with physical world?

💡 Can VR + touch enhance the learning outcome? 

 

• DESIGN PROCESS

1. Unity3D Design

Unity3D is the core software in this project. In this step, Unity is initially used to configure HTC Vive and Leap Motion to create a VR environment. In this scenario, the Unity Collider function triggers a scene transition when a player enters a specific portal. Therefore, when players walk through the virtual environment (scene1), they will be transported to another scene (scene2) by going through a door.

Scene1

Scene2

2. Setup of Physical Environment 

The physical environment of the room supports the touch experience of the player. For this project, some physical props are employed to correspond with the virtual environment. Players experience the sensation of touch using their feet and hands. For example, when the player steps on different material, they enter into different scenes in which they experience the depicted objects by touching actual props setup in the physical room. 

3. User Testing

We performed an experiment to evaluate “Presence” and the learning achievements of users experiencing the VR Touch Museum given three conditions: 1) desktop only, 2) VR only and 3) VR+ touch. We used a between-subjects design with eight participants for each condition. We hypothesized that VR with touch would elicit the highest “Presence” and have the best learning outcomes.

 

 

❀  Acknowlegements  ❀

Prof. Maurizio Forte,     Prof. Regis Kopper,     Prof. Mark Olson,     Prof.Victoria Szabo,     Prof. Bill Seaman,     David Zielinski,     Zekun Cao,     Jo Kwon,

And the many others who helped me during user testing!

VR Historical Image Visualization

Interactive Video