The Thinking Machine

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My Role: Prototype Developer

The Thinking Machine project is a VR experience by Shovels and Whiskey in collaboration with University of California Riverside. It’s an educational tool that allows users to interact with information in the form of objects: selecting, moving, and categorizing customizable data “blocks”. It was made as a tool for studying how interacting with VR is different from interacting with information written on a page, and how the physical movement of using VR might affect information retention, etc.

This project was built in Unity engine, and was the first project in which I had ever used Windows Mixed Reality and the Mixed Reality Toolkit, which was fairly new at the time. Since the toolkit was intended for use with either headset VR or for headset AR, it had a lot of differences from previous VR toolkits that I’d used for development.

Information blocks are automatically generated and placed on a shelf, based on a text list of inputs.
Text and images can appear dynamically on the blocks as the user completes different sorting exercises.
The user moves and sorts the blocks into categories, and their responses are evaluated for correctness before moving on.
In this exercise, the user selects a hypothesis to defend, which they will then need to support with information from a variety of sources.

This project also has a testing version which was built to explore various methods of interaction. This included different ways of transporting around the scene, and of interacting with objects via the controllers. New users were timed while going through the experience to see which types of interactions they learned the fastest.

Different combinations were then created and tested to see which ones were most intuitive to new or inexperienced VR users.

Object interaction options included clicking the controller trigger once to pick up a block and once to drop it, and a click-and-hold variation.
In this alternative interaction mode, the user moves around the scene by selecting from a panel of buttons, rather than point-and-click teleportation.