Lunar Escape: A Social Rift 

In the summer term 2014 master students in Applied Cognitive and Media Science and Applied Computer Science conceptualized and implemented a virtual reality game called “A social rift”. This game offers a multiplayer scenario in which three players interact with each other in a virtual world. The unique feature of this game is that one player is wearing and HMD and interacts with the world using a Razer Hydra, while the two other players interact with tablets. To complete the game a high level of interaction between the players is needed.

Modern VR Systems like the Oculus Rift offer an immersive game experience. This experience is among other factors achieved by shielding the surrounding and presenting immersive visual cues. Hence other players can’t be perceived even if they are in the same room. This problem leads to the primary use of single player games. To counter this problem “A social rift” was developed.

A social rift is a social VR multiplayer game which consists of three different players. One of the players controls a mechanical robot using the razer hydra while wearing an HMD. His task is to repair his broken spaceship. To do so he must fight several enemies and find different items. To achieve this, he depends on his energy and map vision. The energy is generated and administrated by another player, who has a different interface and controls the main functions of the robot. The third player controls a drone which flies around gathering energy and gaining vision over the map. To complete the tasks, all players must communicate and interact with each other. This required interaction is a key element of this game to establish social presence.

The student’s task in this project was to analyze and identifying technical and cognitive key elements of multiplayer and VR games to develop a key concept for a VR social game. After the creation of the concept, graphical assets were created and the game was implemented using Unity 3D. 

During the development, the students have been blogging about their status and findings. You can access the blog under https://blogs.uni-due.de/fp-socialvr14/.

Furthermore, the findings from this project have been presented at ICEC 2016 (Vienna, Austria) and published as a paper in the conference proceedings. 

Stefan Liszio and Maic Masuch. Designing shared virtual reality gaming experiences in local multi-platform games. In 15th International Conference on Entertainment Computing 2016, IFIP ICEC, Vienna, Austria, 2016. (2016)