Final Challenge: Gaze Saber
A quick review of what you should have learned so far:
- Creating a Unity project and navigating its interface
- Making, manipulating, and animating objects using C# scripting
- Giving your application interactivity and controlling its execution flow
- Reading and using external resources and recording things that happened during the game to external files
- Utilizing eye tracking in your application for interaction and data gathering
All these things together should enable you to create a simple version of something like Beat Saber:
We encourage you to distill it to its essentials and add an eye-tracking twist:
- Have a coroutine that creates cubes coming towards you to destroy
- Have the cubes appear with specific intervals, with some options to try out:
- Fixed (like the cube factory)
- Variable/random
- Scripted/sequenced, with playlists of intervals read from an external file
- Increasing in frequency as time goes on
- Impart parameters on each cube (random or scripted):
- Color (or texture)
- Initial position
- Velocity (increasing over time?)
- Have colliders (your controllers or a additional saber-like object, e.g., cylinders) to destroy the cubes on contact, with playback of a sound
- Allow any collider to destroy them or do like Beat Saber, where only the red saber cuts red cubes, etc
- Allow cube destruction through gaze:
- Immediate, as in the previous tutorial (too easy)
- Requiring a fixation for minimum time before destruction (would require each cube object to keep track of how much time it has been gazed on)
- Record player performance
- Success rate (e.g., how many cubes were destroyed vs. passed behind the player)
- Timing (e.g., how long did a cube survive on average before being destroyed)
- Preference (e.g., did the user prefer to cut cubes or to stare them down)
- Accuracy (e.g., were cubes "cleanly" fixated on, or did the player switch gaze from cube to cube without finishing them off)
There is a lot of freedom to express yourself in designing this simple game! Something that could be particularly fun is to balance the minimum time it takes to "stare down" a cube before it disappears, so that the difficulty of continuously looking at it is about equal to that of cutting it — this is of course highly dependent on the number, speed, and frequency of incoming cubes!
We're excited to see what you can come up with. Have fun!
Feedback reminder
At the end of this workshop we would appreciate your feedback — did it work for you? Suggestions? Criticism?
Please fill out this form just before you leave, or shortly after — a fresh memory would be best ;-)