Reflection
Our initial idea for this project did not prove successful both in interaction design and technically. A flat surrounding which vibrated in synchrony with breath proved neither stimulating nor intuitive. Users found it difficult to understand what they needed to do. Replacing this interaction with a guided direct breathing excercise and a humming based excercise seemed easier for users to enjoy. Furthermore, the idea to use a speech recognition trigger was neither reliable nor responsive enough and was successfully replaced by much more simple volume detection. Having such a large change of course put the team under a lot of time pressure, and maybe we should have changed our plan earlier. However, we learnt to aim for simple and intuitive interactions at first.
We built two different scenes where voice interaction provided a sense of agency, and combined with other virtual reality features successfully: hand interactions and immersive environment changes. However the voice interaction was unreliable on demo day, and we had a number of hardware issues. Also the calibration for the microphone we used that day was not perfect. Throughout building this project there were numerous difficulties with both the software and hardware related to audio. This is because voice interaction is still quite underdeveloped in the virtual reality space, so we can be proud of our achievement, and maybe this could be an avenue for future development.
Our team dynamic was unbalanced in terms of technical workload. I was tasked with doing the technical development work and this should have been shared equally across the team. Maybe I could have organised group coding and pairing sessions to tackle the work together so we could have shared the technical experience.
Ultimately, we proved successful in building a calming meditation application using voice, however there is much more potential for the use of voice in virtual reality.