This project was made as part of HKU’s Raak! seminar, in which we were invited to create a design – in any form, using any medium – that creates a connection between the user and their surroundings, or the user and themselves.
After a few days of brainstorming and iteration, we settled for the idea of a virtual pub. For those who know VRChat: it’s basically the same, but targeted at a more casual audience, with the main difference being that it can be ran in a browser on a low-end computer with only a mouse, a keyboard and a somewhat stable internet connection.
Playtest #1
For our first playtest, we asked our co-students to join a Discord channel. Here, they were split into groups of 3. Instead of joining a separate channel, we asked them to lower the volume of everyone not in their group to 20%.
This created a setting in which (most of) our participants could hold a conversation with their group without being distracted by the background noise. Most of the participants experienced the noise of other people chatting in the background as pleasant.
Playtest #2
In the second playtest, we streamed the prototype virtual environment, which can be found on this itch.io page. Linking these two different playtests together, the participants gave us a lot of varied feedback:
