Welcome to Meta-Museum Development Log! Here, we provide updates about the status of Meta-Museum and plans for future development. Stay tuned for weekly updates on our progress.
Latest News
Gold (12/5/2023)
Success Criteria:
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Technical Sophistication:
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Trivia questions spawn upon clicking the start button so users can play the trivia when they are ready. This involved creating an affordance that spawns multiple widgets with custom text in the proper location relative to one another.
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Museum passes are located in each exhibit and are used to unlock the next exhibit. These passes are spawned when certain trivia questions are answered correctly, when a user picks up an object the pass is under, or after an interaction is played. They are earned in different ways to keep the user engaging with the entire exhibit
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Interactions: Each exhibit has a unique interaction. Two examples is you can use a sword to split wood in the Medieval exhibit and you can throw shurikens at a target in the Japanese exhibit
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Exhibits: Each exhibit has a unique style, theme, and NPC to introduce the exhibit
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***Pokedex artifact list: The pokedex-style artifact list is a complex feature that is attached to the users left hand. The list uses widgets and advanced UI elements to track which artifacts have been discovered in each exhibit, updating the page corresponding to which exhibit the artifact resided in with the object name, picture, and description.***
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***NPCs move around the exhibit in unique paths, can be interacted with by the user to make the museum feel more real, and give helpful hints***
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Novelty:
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​Museums usually require attendance at the location of the museum. Meta-museum allows users to enjoy museums from anywhere in the world.
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In regular museums, visitors are only allowed to view artifacts on display. Meta-museum allows users to become much more engaged with the museum by picking up objects, closely examining them, throwing the weapons, etc. These fun interactions help users become more excited about the artifacts and have a more enjoyable museum experience
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Museum passes ensure that users are interacting with multiple aspects of each exhibit before moving to the next.
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Social Impact:
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Meta-Museum is an educational resource that users can use to learn about different regions of the world over different time periods. Through reading artifact descriptions and interacting with artifacts by holding them, users can learn about what the objects are called, what they were used for, who used them, when they were used, and other relevant details. Users can also interact with NPCs and trivia questions to learn the exhibit theme and see how much they remembered from the exhibit. Meta-Museum helps the user determine how well they engaged with each exhibit by placing museum passes in each exhibit that unlocks the next exhibit. These passes can be found by answering trivia correctly, looking under objects, or playing interactions.
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Many people are not located near a museum and may not even be that interested in museums to begin with. Meta-Museum provides a great way for museums to expand their reach to anywhere in the world, generating more interest in museums and may even inspire users to visit the museum in real life.
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XR Emphasis:
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Museums are naturally a very visual experience. Meta-museum allows users to examine artifacts as they would in a regular museum, but also encourages users to make use of XR capabilities such as picking up items and using them as they would be in the real world​
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Meta-Museum brings the museum to life with NPCs, special interactions, and trivia
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Financial Sustainability:
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Setup: Meta-Museum's main cost is all the work that goes into developing the museum. We charge users on a per square foot basis which can start as several exhibits at first and eventually be the entire museum. This is a significant profit for developing the VR museum
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Monthly: Meta-Museum will also earn monthly profit to cover data storage, maintenance, and hosting of museum content. The monthly cost will scale with the number of users
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In-Museum purchases: There will be an exclusive exhibit which can be accessed when users purchase it from Meta-Museum. This profit will be shared between the museum organization and Meta-Museum
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This week, our main goal was to iterate on previous features fixing bugs, add new features helping users track their progress in the museum, and continue to add additional detail. The main areas of improvement that our product testers helped us identify from the previous version includes:
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Add Pokedex-style list of artifacts for each exhibit
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Expand on NPC concept
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Critique existing features
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Pokedex-style list of Artifacts
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Many times, it is easy to go through an exhibit in the real world and overlook several artifacts. The Pokedex-style list of artifacts attempts to solve this problem by helping users visually see the artifacts they have interacted with in each exhibit and has slots with question marks to indicate that there are more objects which have not been interacted with yet. Once an artifact has been interacted with, the question mark item in the list is updated with the artifact's name, picture, and description. This list can also be accessed in other exhibits if a user wants to see all the artifacts they have discovered.​
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NPC
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Added more NPCs with unique dialogue to give them personality
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Added movement to NPCs to make museum feel more realistic
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Changed position of NPCs to be inside exhibit
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Other Critiques
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Changed artifact description background from the solid white background to partially see-through to be more visually-appealing
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Improved museum pass appearance and added extra flashy exclusive pass
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Fixed tree mesh in Greek/Roman exhibit
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Switched wood cutting interaction from the sword to the ax to be more realistic
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For this deadline, we made the exclusive museum pass to be more flashy than the other passes. However, under the advisement of the professor we didn't implement the exclusive exhibit or remaining exhibits under construction for the Gold deadline. Rather, we focused on making the existing exhibits the best they could be and adding features like the artifact list and NPCs to show the best version of the game. With a solid foundation of a high quality partial VR museum, we can show users proof of concept and how awesome a VR museum can be.
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In the future, we hope to build out the exhibits under construction to be to the same level of quality as the existing exhibits. We also hope to develop the exclusive exhibit to be an escape room where there are extra interactions in the room and users interact even more with the exhibit to find clues that will lead to their escape. This escape room would be built based off the theme from the real Met exhibit at this location in the museum.
![loader,gif](https://static.parastorage.com/services/santa-resources/dist/editor/imageUploadToStage/loader_300x300.gif)
Alpha (11/22/23)
Success Criteria:
-
Technical Sophistication:
-
Trivia questions spawn upon clicking the start button so users can play the trivia when they are ready. This involved creating an affordance that spawns multiple widgets with custom text in the proper location relative to one another.
-
Museum passes are located in each exhibit and are used to unlock the next exhibit. These passes are spawned when certain trivia questions are answered correctly, when a user picks up an object the pass is under, or after an interaction is played. They are earned in different ways to keep the user engaging with the entire exhibit
-
Interactions: Each exhibit has a unique interaction. Two examples is you can use a sword to split wood in the Medieval exhibit and you can throw shurikens at a target in the Japanese exhibit
-
Exhibits: Each exhibit has a unique style, theme, and NPC to introduce the exhibit
-
-
Novelty:
-
​Museums usually require attendance at the location of the museum. Meta-museum allows users to enjoy museums from anywhere in the world.
-
In regular museums, visitors are only allowed to view artifacts on display. Meta-museum allows users to become much more engaged with the museum by picking up objects, closely examining them, throwing the weapons, etc. These fun interactions help users become more excited about the artifacts and have a more enjoyable museum experience
-
Museum passes ensure that users are interacting with multiple aspects of each exhibit before moving to the next.
-
-
Social Impact:
-
Meta-Museum is an educational resource that users can use to learn about different regions of the world over different time periods. Through reading artifact descriptions and interacting with artifacts by holding them, users can learn about what the objects are called, what they were used for, who used them, when they were used, and other relevant details. Users can also interact with NPCs and trivia questions to learn the exhibit theme and see how much they remembered from the exhibit. Meta-Museum helps the user determine how well they engaged with each exhibit by placing museum passes in each exhibit that unlocks the next exhibit. These passes can be found by answering trivia correctly, looking under objects, or playing interactions.
-
Many people are not located near a museum and may not even be that interested in museums to begin with. Meta-Museum provides a great way for museums to expand their reach to anywhere in the world, generating more interest in museums and may even inspire users to visit the museum in real life.
-
-
XR Emphasis:
-
Museums are naturally a very visual experience. Meta-museum allows users to examine artifacts as they would in a regular museum, but also encourages users to make use of XR capabilities such as picking up items and using them as they would be in the real world​
-
Meta-Museum brings the museum to life with NPCs, special interactions, and trivia
-
-
Financial Sustainability:
-
Setup: Meta-Museum's main cost is all the work that goes into developing the museum. We charge users on a per square foot basis which can start as several exhibits at first and eventually be the entire museum. This is a significant profit for developing the VR museum
-
Monthly: Meta-Museum will also earn monthly profit to cover data storage, maintenance, and hosting of museum content. The monthly cost will scale with the number of users
-
In-Museum purchases: There will be an exclusive exhibit which can be accessed when users purchase it from Meta-Museum. This profit will be shared between the museum organization and Meta-Museum
-
​
​
This week, our main goal was to increase the level of detail and interactions for each existing exhibit to make the experience feel as authentic as possible. The main areas of improvement that our product testers helped us identify from the previous version includes:
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each exhibit needs to have a themed design
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descriptions should be easier to read
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there should be more interactions
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there should be a way to track which interactions have been completed
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pricing needs to be more specific
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Themed design
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Redesigned all exhibits and starting room by creating appropriate materials for each room, importing additional design models such as domes and mats from sketchfab, and critiquing small details such as lighting and font color
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Descriptions
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Added descriptions to Heads Up Display (HUD) so the description stays in the users view
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Enlarged text so the text is easier to read
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Revised descriptions so they more closely match the style of a museum and are more informative
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Added description background to make text easier to read
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Interactions
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Added wood splitting, tree watering, and genie interactions.
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Added themed trivia questions as a fun way for users to test how well they interacted with the room
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Added museum passes which are described in success criteria
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Added NPCs with dialogue to introduce exhibit and accept passes to unlock exhibit
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Tracking Interactions
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Used NPC to introduce each room and call out the unique interaction
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Pricing
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Updated monthly pricing to have a more specific description and make sure it scaled
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Updated In-Museum purchases profit share to give larger share to the museums
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For this deadline, we decided to remove the point system and add museum passes instead to fit the museum theme. These passes also work better with the NPC theme where you can hand them to the NPC to unlock the museum.
The other change of plan was shifting In-museum purchases from purchasing museum points to purchasing an exclusive museum. We found that this would be more similar to how actual museums make money since some museums charge additional fees for special exhibits.
We included exhibits that are part of the Metropolitan but haven't been developed yet so that the museum flows and added a coming soon sign to indicated that it will eventually be a new exhibit. We also added the exclusive exhibit which is blocked off by a door that users can't see through. To preserve the flow of the museum for users who don't purchase the exclusive museum pass, there is a pathway next to the exclusive entrance that users can use to go to the next museum.
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Future Developments:
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We are also planning to develop a Pokedex to store which items have and haven't been interacted with from each museum in the form of a hand menu.
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Change font for descriptions and object titles
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Complete exclusive exhibit content - this could be the actual exhibit in the met at this location in the museum with extra interactions or we were thinking of making it a fun escape room where users need to use clues to find a museum pass out of the room which would be a fun challenge. This could involve drums for example when you play them in the correct order then a clue could appear.
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Add npc museum goers that walk around and look at exhibits
Milestone 2 (11/15/2023)
This week our main goal was to continue building out the museum exhibits, implement feedback from product testers, and include more interactive elements to Meta-Museum. The main areas of improvement that our product testers helped us identify included structure of the museum, descriptions, and website improvements.
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Museum Structure
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Redesigned museum structure into connected rooms.
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Museum music now loops.
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Museum Points
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Added a museum points system to unlock rooms. Each room is barricaded by a glass wall that costs museum points to break. Players can obtain museum points by reading descriptions of the art and completing special interactions with the art.
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Created a Heads Up Display (HUD) that shows the player how many museum points they have.
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Comments: We switched from using doors that teleport players to exhibits to a connected exhibit structure that mimics the layout of the real life Metropolitan. We believe that this will make the museum flow better as users can easily go from one exhibit to the next. We wanted to find a way to both encourage players to interact with art and guide them through the museum. This prompted us to create a museum points system, which allows players to earn points by interacting with objects and playing minigames. Museum points can then be used to unlock other exhibits. This idea not only adds a fun challenge to the experience, but it ensures that users fully engage with the current exhibit before moving to the next. We plan to expand on this concept in the future by adding more unique interactions that generates museum points and plan to expand how these points can be spent.
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Art Descriptions
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Added descriptions to each art piece that appears briefly when clicked on.
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Comments: A necessary feature of museums is that each art piece in the museum has a small description that educates people about the art piece. Thus, we added a way for users to click on the art and have a small description about the art piece appear.
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New Exhibits
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Added a medieval exhibit.
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Added an Egyptian exhibit.
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New Interaction
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Added shuriken target practice.
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Comments: We wanted to find a way to make the museum more interactive and really leverage the VR platform to maximize the museum experience. This prompted us to create a minigame involving throwing a shuriken at targets to earn museum points in the Japanese room.
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Future Objectives:
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Add four new exhibits.
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Add more interactions which generate museum points
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Add items that can be purchased with real money
One idea we have for the future is to implement a currency system that would be based on real money. Currency would be used to purchase art pieces and add them to a user's personal area. In the user's personal area, the purchased art pieces would have special and exclusive interactions that are not available in the main museum. We believe that this would encourage users to get excited about artifacts and their unique interactions. Additionally, we believe it offers an opportunity to improve our museum as an ecosystem where we would split the profits with the museum we are replicating, increasing the financial sustainability of Meta-Museum and offering a way to become closer collaborators with museums themselves.
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By the third deadline, we are planning to add the last few exhibits this upcoming week so that all the rooms flow and are connected. We also plan to expand on the museum points system and adding more interactions to the museum. After this is complete, we will really perfect the small details of the museum to make it feel as real as possible and explore the idea of a currency system.
![loader,gif](https://static.parastorage.com/services/santa-resources/dist/editor/imageUploadToStage/loader_300x300.gif)
![loader,gif](https://static.parastorage.com/services/santa-resources/dist/editor/imageUploadToStage/loader_300x300.gif)
Milestone 1 (11/8/2023)
Kicking off this week, we brainstormed ideas for our project and landed on creating a museum in virtual reality.
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Some of the other ideas we considered were:
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Planet simulator
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Chemistry lab
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Periodic table to spawn atoms & build molecules in 3d
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Math + spelling game
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First aid / CPR interactive tutorial where you give CPR / perform first aid
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Scuba diving
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Motorcycle vr / manual driving
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Open field / race track (with obstacles & timed)
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3d building / architect design platform
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We ended up choosing the VR museum because it best satisfied the Technical Sophistication, Novelty, Social Impact, XR Emphasis, and Financial Stability criteria. Our plan is to recreate a portion of the famous Metropolitan Museum in New York City. The artwork will be replicated as best as possible and be organized into thematic rooms. For this milestone, we designed a main entrance hall with the Metropolitan's iconic Sphinx, two display rooms, and a personal exhibit room, which we intend for users to have as their own personal space to design and collect art. Additionally, we implemented a few basic interactions associated with the museum and the art (such as grabbing and traveling between rooms). We believe this will serve as a strong foundation from which we will build on in the coming weeks.
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Looking ahead into next week, we plan on implementing more interactions with the art and interactions that correspond to the theme of the art room. Furthermore, we plan on continuing to develop the layout of the museum and including more art to show off to users. Stay tuned!