Development of a virtual pet game using oculus rift and leap motion technologies.

Recent emerging technology with a Virtual Reality (VR) aspect is very research-driven as well as successful in commercial devices. Within it, the most advantageous technology is the Oculus Rift headset because of its light-weight, low-cost and high quality, which has potential to bring novel VR theory into practice. Furthermore, Leap Motion has emerged as a high precision bared hand tracker which supports VR integration. Thus, the combination of these technologies is promising in many application areas. Gaming is one of these, particularly the life simulation game genre because gaming not only bridges users to familiar technology but also gives them full immersion into the synthetic world. Among the many successful simulation games, the digital pet raising game genre has proven itself in the gamers’ community as well as in relation to advances in motion controller games. This has motivated the development of a virtual reality pet game. So, this research envisages to develop a prototype of a pet-raising game using the Unity game engine based on Leap Motion and Oculus Rift technologies. The prototype contains a variety of pet interactions including feeding, cleaning, throw-catch, tricks training, etc. to enhance the hand motion controlling of Leap Motion as well as playing with first person perspective to give full immersion in terms of VR. After that, the importance of game evaluation is justified via quantitative research approaches, aming to investigate into the interactive technologies like Leap Motion. Kinectimals game based on Xbox Kinect technology, was selected to compare two games in terms of motion controlling similarity. Two experiments which are similar procedure on the developed game and Kinectimals, are conducted in order to collect objective measures such as duration, task and failure rate; plus participant’s subjective reporting following three questionnaires, the After-Scenario Questionnaire (ASQ), IBM computer usability satisfaction questionnaire (CSUQ) and NASA-Task Load Index (NASA-TLX). Those questionnaires included standard questions and additional questions which are specific design for the prototype. Comparing to Kinectimals, the game achieved a high acceptable score in terms of workload, information and interface quality satisfaction. The final prototype received much positive feedback without simulator/motion sickness during long term playing and interface design. Moreover, beside the rich content game playing, some hand gestures including fist, face-up hand, throw-grab activities were the most reliable using Leap Motion. However, hand tracking issues were identified due to the lack of robustness, particular in dynamic gestures. As a result, main contribution is to make VR more accessible to ordinary people via gaming as well as how to apply the immersion into a specific game genre. In spite of some games/applications based on these technologies combinations, the serious experiments verifying their feasibility are limited, which makes this research worth to carry on. The experiment’s findings it is hoped contribute to promoting the pet game genre within a VR setting, in particular immersion role and motion controlling.