Project Description & Development

In the fall of 2018 a faculty member approached us with a prototype game he envisioned for his freshman chemistry students. The main goal was to test them on the most common safety infractions found in a lab. We set to work with adopting his Google street view style prototype into something more engaging and fun while remaining within his learning objectives and overall vision for the project.

In addition, we also had a goal to develop a VR version of the game for Oculus Go. This would be titled Lab Safety VR, and the browser version was retroactively titled Chemistry Safety Rules.

Our goal was to turn this into something fun that appeals to the types of learners who would play this game. To that end we added a scoring mechanic, a timer, and more humorous writing throughout the infractions text. We wanted to appeal to their competitive nature and jokes can liven up even the driest of material.

Speaking of, ever hear about what they do with dead chemists? Barium!

Ahem…

My main contributions to the project were in the overall design, adding a mini-map, and the scoring mechanic. After the browser version was finished, I then worked closely with a contracted studio to port the game to Oculus Go, and ensure the project was playing to the strengths of VR and avoiding common pitfalls. Reconfiguring the in-game UI, for example, was one such potential pitfall.

In browser, the screen is easily readable and centered in the user’s view. In VR, this was not the case. We found out the camera zoom (in the browser version it zooms in on an infraction once clicked on) was causing some motion sickness and screen tearing. Worse still, the text on-screen was not legible, and due to the way it was programmed, there was not an easy way to redo the infractions UI without redoing the entire game.

The solution we developed was quite simple. The Oculus Go version allows users to look around with their headset, and we added the ability to turn the player character by clicking left and right on the Oculus Go’s remote touchpad. We added a slight fade in and out for every movement jump (this was ultimately removed after testing discovered this was not a motion sickness culprit). For the big UI problem, we changed the UI so that instead of the camera zooming in on an infraction screen, we had the UI game object move itself closer to the user’s view. The text was now legible, any motion sickness was gone, and users could now select infractions. 

We had a stretch goal of allowing users to place the infractions screen wherever they wanted within the game world, but we ultimately felt this would’ve opened up too many edge cases (and having multiple infractions windows open crashed the game).

Back of the box & controls

• Click through an actual chemistry lab and find all the safety infractions as quickly and as accurately as possible.
• Every safety infraction has multiple answers as for why it’s an infraction, so choose correctly.
• Zoom in on anything with the shift key
• Jump to the end of a hallway with the J key
• Exit the door when you feel you’ve found all the safety infractions.