Το work with title Design and development of a role playing game (RPG) based on building social worlds in virtual reality by Bampaniotis Fotios is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Bibliographic Citation
Fotios Bampaniotis, "Design and development of a role playing game (RPG) based on building social worlds in virtual reality", Diploma Work, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece, 2024
https://doi.org/10.26233/heallink.tuc.100133
With the technological advances of recent years, Extended Reality (XR) (Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR)) hardware costs have decreased, making XR applications accessible to a wide range of users. The number of applications that emerge for XR devices has been rapidly increasing, with cutting-edge features being developed both in the virtual and physical realms, that create unique immersive experiences. There is still a great amount of research being done on how such technologies can assist in the creation of educational processes in various fields, such as educational flight simulators, by reducing the cost and risk of use of physical world analogues. This thesis focuses on VR and explores the way various types of User Interfaces (UIs) and AudioVisual (AV) effects impact User Experience (UX) in such applications, while also investigating if social educational games enriched with fantasy elements can increase user engagement and presence in the virtual world to ultimately enhance UX even further. This thesis presents the design, implementation and evaluation of an educational collaboration VR game of the Role Playing Game (RPG) genre, where users can create their own stories collaboratively and play them to achieve desired tasks. Diegetic, non-diegetic, spatial and meta UIs are employed alongside AV effects used for immersion and narrative purposes, while the design of the application aims to provide the users with the means to create virtual worlds, where they can learn, bond with each other and have fun by playing different roles.