Baba Yoga

Overview

Baba Yoga is a VR prototype made in collaboration with the Human-Centered Computing Lab at the University of Florida. This project was meant as a teaching tool for children to help them learn and practice yoga, with the spin of setting it all inside of a magical world inspired by a Russian fairy tale. We used Virtual Reality and HTV Vive trackers to immerse the player and help keep their movements tracked as accurately as possible.

Design & Development

While designing the game our subject matter expert (SME) took a very proactive role in the creation of the prototype. We for the most part adhered to her vision and created compromises when necessary. As the game was targeted at children, we actually took a good amount of inspiration from children’s shows like Dora the Explorer when considering script and design.

Having prior experience with VR, a lot of the core integrations necessary to get it up and running ran smoothly. However, there were some issues with the interaction between unity and the updated HTC Vive, which forced us to take a few work arounds to continue development.

To help handle the progression of the scene, I developed a loose state system for the narrative flow for the game. Essentially in each scene, you could add a series of scene states to be cycled through as the player progresses. I designed them in a way to be flexible and easy to apply to each scene and event driven so that it would update the scene in reaction to player action or inaction. The system greatly streamlined our ability to set up narrative segments, and easily allowed us to extend the project scope to include all of our SME’s suggestions.

I also developed a pose system for the project. I did this by creating a basic “rig” to be used and angled the “joints” to match the orientation of the desired pose. From there, we calibrated the player’s dimensions by asking them to T-pose, allowing us to estimate their measurements using the distances between the trackers and headset. Player poses were recorded by a group of 5 trigger boxes tied to each tracker on the wrists, ankles, and waist. I also created appropriate AI locked to the headset, that made sure players would know which body parts were in the right position and how long they need to maintain their poses.