Dev Log

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

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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:

1. each exhibit needs to have a themed design

2. descriptions should be easier to read

3. there should be more interactions

4. there should be a way to track which interactions have been completed

5. pricing needs to be more specific

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Themed design

• 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

• Added descriptions to Heads Up Display (HUD) so the description stays in the users view

• Enlarged text so the text is easier to read

• Revised descriptions so they more closely match the style of a museum and are more informative

• Added description background to make text easier to read

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Interactions

• Added wood splitting, tree watering, and genie interactions.

• Added themed trivia questions as a fun way for users to test how well they interacted with the room

• Added museum passes which are described in success criteria

• Added NPCs with dialogue to introduce exhibit and accept passes to unlock exhibit

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Tracking Interactions

• Used NPC to introduce each room and call out the unique interaction

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Pricing

• Updated monthly pricing to have a more specific description and make sure it scaled

• 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:

• 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.

• Change font for descriptions and object titles

• 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.

• Add npc museum goers that walk around and look at exhibits