The Thinking Machine

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My Role: Developer

The Thinking Machine project is a VR experience by Shovels and Whiskey. It’s an educational tool that allows users to interact with information in the form of objects: selecting, moving, and categorizing customizable data “blocks”.

The experience is built in Unity using Windows Mixer Reality.

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 interaction modes. This included different methods of transporting around the scene, and of interacting with objects via the controllers.

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.