Assignment 2

2 years ago by kiaric

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Overview

Virtual Dicebox is an AR application where at its core, users can choose from a variety of virtual boxes and game dice to project and manipulate over the top of the real world. Geared towards players of Dungeons and Dragons, this application would also feature an unintrusive side news hub where users can stay up to date on game supplement releases and other products.

Description

Virtual Dicebox, or at least the prototype of it developed with this report, is an application which provides the user with a virtual rolling space (the dice box) and buttons to drop game dice of various sides used in tabletop games into the world using an Android phone.

A full version of the application would allow the user to choose from a variety of dice sets and boxes, automatic dice addition and the ability to roll several dice in one tap, and an unobtrusive section with other tools, one of which gives a rundown on Dungeons and Dragons news and product releases.

The Virtual Dicebox helps bridge the gap between the tactile feeling of rolling dice with the flexibility of randomly generating dice rolls digitally by instead using a simulated AR environment. Making Virtual Dicebox a free, ad-free application with optional purchases is imperative to it succeeding. Consumers are turned off by programs filled with ads and in-app purchases- it should be able to inform users at their discretion of new Dungeons and Dragons supplement books and the like. Wizards of the Coast, the developers of Dungeons and Dragons, would be able to make money directly from the app through optional, low cost, cosmetic purchases which would appeal to players for instance by giving their dice materials and effects that aren’t possible in the real world, like energy auras, or moving textures.

Wizards of the Coast bring in money from Dungeons and Dragons largely from selling source books and indirectly get advertisement from the popularity of media featuring Dungeons and Dragons (such as the Critical Role podcast, or the Stranger Things series). Virtual Dicebox would be able to pull in additional revenue from their customers on their own terms in a similar way to their online service D&D Beyond, but unlike that service, the user wouldn’t have to pay money to gain the full utility of the application.

The use of AR in Virtual Dicebox brings an element of interactivity that is otherwise only present while using real (sometimes expensive) dice. The dice box could be entirely simulated, with the user rolling virtual dice in a wholly virtual environment, but AR provides a level of immersion; you can physically move your dice box around by moving the image target, for instance, and you can look around your dice box in any way you wish.

Technical Information & Interaction

A user spawns and rolls a die to a wonderful outcome

In the prototype, the user can tap on buttons rendered on the screen to reset the rolling space (the topmost button), or spawn dice (the buttons on the side). The user can drop dice with four up to twenty sides, and percentile dice (two ten sided dice which simulate a 100 sided die). Once in the world, the dice can be moved around by the user’s touch and drag. The user needs to be able to spawn dice to roll them, and allowing the user to move the dice themselves is helpful for immersion. Resetting the dice box is a good way to keep clutter at bay without manually flinging each die out of the box individually.

The application was developed with the Vuforia VR engine, which works by mapping the dice and dice box to an image target in the real world. There is an easter egg in the prototype- confetti erupts from a twenty sided die when it rolls a 20, which is the most significant roll result in many systems, including the current edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

3d Models

The dice box- the rolling area for the dice, which stops the dice from easily falling out of the area. I created this model myself for the application.