The Village: a VR village built by kids
Using virtual reality to reimagine an old form of play
the brief
I was recently among six students from my course who were invited to participate in an ongoing project that researches how children play. We were given eight weeks to find a way of using virtual reality to bring a new life to an old form of play, and our project would then culminate in a VR prototype that would be showcased during the Festival of Play at the V&A Museum of Childhood.
Initially, we started excavating for an old form of play in the project’s archive, but, knowing that our final prototype would be anchored at the V&A MoC, we visited the museum hoping it could inform our project. Inside its cabinets, the museum encapsulates the history of how children have played throughout times and we began exploring it individually at our own pace. However, after wandering around, we found each other standing in front of The Village, an installation by Turner prize winner Rachel Whiteread, which consists of one-hundred-fifty houses collected by the artist during the course of twenty years.
Trending AR VR Articles:
1. Mario Kart in a real vehicle with VR!
2. How XR Can Unleash Cognition
3. Oculus Go, the Nintendo Switch of VR
4. Five Augmented Reality Uses That Solve Real-Life Problems
The houses are displayed in a setting of a constant night time, completely deserted and lit only by the light glowing through the small windows of the houses. We started asking ourselves why the village was empty and who left it behind. We then remembered a time when we were kids, and how we wanted to shrink and become small enough to enter dollhouses, to climb up the tiny stairs and play inside the miniature bedroom. Realizing that VR technology could make this dream happen, we decided to bring the deserted village to life with stories and interactions, similar to how children bring a dollhouse to life through scenarios and objects.
what’s inside?
This deserted and mystical village reminded me of Macondo, the fictional village of Marquez’s One-hundred years of solitude, and the houses reminded me of the generations of Buedía family, thus I imagined the same complexity of narrative and characters populating our village. However, we assumed that in order to design for children, we had to design with them too, and our project began developing a participatory design approach, as we invited local schoolchildren to a ‘game design’ workshop.
The workshop outcomes would feed the VR experience directly, thus it was crucial for its structure to be designed accordingly to what we wanted out of it. I thought that the story of the village as a whole was as important as the story of each character because it would be interesting to see how they influenced each other, which lead to dividing children into two teams, with the first team developing the history of the village, while the second imagining those who lived inside some of the houses. Each child was also given a specific role, such as ‘history creator’, ‘settings designer’ and ‘character developer.’
The architecture of the workshop, on the other hand, incited a lot of discussion in our team, as we had to find a balance between structure and freedom, as too much structure would limit children’s imagination, while too much freedom could quickly make them feel lost. When I visited ‘Now Play This’ exhibition back in April, the game that amazed me the most was a card game that helped its players build a story, limiting their possibilities through some tokens. I recalled that when I played the game with my brother, although we used the same cards and the same tokens, we both imagined two different stories, showing me that the cards and the tokens provided a perfect balance between structure and freedom, and inspiring me to assemble the workshop upon the same principles.
The workshop was run by Juliette, Izabela, and Feiqi, and for two hours they and the kids imagined the history of the village as a timeline, from its creation to its abandonment. In relationship to history, children created a series of characters through playing with the cards and the tokens. They imagined a king, who built the village a long time ago to protect his family, and fantasized about a witch who spelled a curse on the village upon visiting the King, probably causing the present situation that includes a dictator, anarchy and destruction. Their thought process showed us that, although being young children, they carry witness to our times, inspiring us to transform the village into a metaphor of current political situations.
The children then started building stories of both humans and non-humans who lived inside the houses and gave us unusual characters such as a blue-haired scientist, the calculator man, and the fireflies. Unfortunately, the children of the second workshop were tired and wishing to simply play, thus the characters that they built were not as developed as we hoped them to be. Although the characters lacked a story, they, combined with the story created from the first part of the workshop, still provided a solid base for us to build upon.
the hero journey
When it came to designing the game narrative and imagining the world inside the VR, I decided to start from the hero journey. I followed the artist’s vision of evoking feelings to its audience by inviting them to wonder who lived inside the houses and why they left. The hero journey had to be an exploration instead of a pure mission, which itself had to be framed around the characters.
I divided the characters into main and secondary ones, and if the story of the main characters would illustrate the story of the whole village, the secondary characters had to hold strong metaphors in themselves in order to be part of the story at all. The names of the characters created by the kids inspired me when contextualizing their stories: the Scientist explores the imagined relationship between the village installation and us, the visitors of the museum; the Calculator Man represent those who live in the past and fear their future, while the Fireflies portrays groups of people that are left aside, marginalized from the society they are part of. My inspiration for these characters were the people that the Little Prince visits before coming to Earth, who are all doing useless jobs, being both ridiculous and melancholic.
The story of the King and the Witch was the most complex to build, as we did not want to simply build a good character and an evil one, but rather characters who are both good and evil. Thus, although the King created the village with the right intentions, he was punished by the Witch since he destroyed the forest so the Witch, despite being considered evil at first, is understood for her actions, although she herself questions them. As the Witch becomes a metaphor of cultures that have been erased, the King becomes as tyrannical as absurd, a dictator over just a sneaky gecko and a terrified rooster.
the rabbit hole
A virtual experience is often intangible, abstract and very separated from the physical world, and the transition from the physical to the virtual world is often very quick. Therefore, in order to make the transition intuitive and most importantly, physicalize the virtual experience, I started the hero journey with physical boarding passes for a fictional train that would take children through a virtual journey inside the village. Then, the journey would end with the ticket being stamped and given to the child as a memory of their virtual visit. The ticket proved to be a successful method of onboarding children, as they were extremely careful to present their ticket before the experience and extremely happy to get a stamp in the end.
“The Village” reimagined virtually
The virtual world was constructed by Juliette with low poly graphics as research shows that it makes children feel more comfortable. Initially, we wanted to make each character inside the house narrate its own story, but then, as the village was deserted and the characters had left, we decided to have a narrator tell each story once a kid entered inside a house. The decoration of each house reflected the human or non-human who lived there, and Dimitris, as well as designing the ambient sound of the experience, composed distinct melodies for each character, accompanying the stories beautifully.
While the stories existed virtually, the characters could be encountered physically, and Izabela created them for children to play with. The dolls were built to target a younger audience of children who, for safety reasons, wouldn’t be allowed to try the VR prototype. However, similar to the boarding pass, the dolls helped physicalize the virtual experience outside the headset and, together with some coloring sheets and miniatures of the dollhouses, they created a waiting area for kids to forget they were waiting for their allocated slot.
reflections on the event
For ten hours spread across the two days of the event, we ran almost one-hundred virtual experiences of “The Village” which, although designed to target children, attracted an audience whose age ranged from as young as five years old who tried the experience for thirty seconds, to an eighty years old lady who entered inside virtual reality for the first time in her life. The response that we received was very positive, the kids enjoyed playing with VR and a girl told her friend that was about to embark on the virtual journey that she felt as if she was inside a story, which was “soooo coooool”.
I always tend to put my design work in the world as I enjoy witnessing how different audiences react to it, thus the two days of the event served as powerful testing for the prototype and also research process for future projects. We started noticing that different age groups reacted differently to the experience: the older children would spend more time inside the houses to listen to the story (which should have been shorter) while the younger children would just teleport everywhere. Teleporting, on the other hand, created confusion in how children would wander around as they would instinctively keep pressing the button, even if they just wanted to turn around. For some children, it was the very first time they were trying VR, so they didn’t really care about the story as much as just exploring around at their own pace.
If we were to develop the project, I would focus on three areas: the goal, the physical world, and interactivity. The hero journey should include small goals that would provide children with have a sense of purpose of their being inside the virtual world. That could either be achieved through an invitation to the village, or they would have to do or find something in order to listen to the stories. The tickets and the dolls were very successful in physicalizing the experience, but I would work on adding more elements such as a newspaper of the village, wearables or even find a way to make the hero journey go back and forth between the physical and the virtual world. And finally, I noticed that children would have liked interacting with the world inside, as they were already trying to touch the objects around them or go up and down.
a very interesting encounter
Among the children that booked a slot, the one that I still can’t forget was a little girl called G. She had just been to the videogames workshop downstairs and, right after trying our experience, was going to a Pokemon event. She suggested to me that we should have cats inside the houses because children love cats, which would make them stay longer inside the houses and, therefore, listen to the stories. I hope that through the virtual experience and the stories unraveled we inspired the children that tried our prototype, but G, with the knowledge of a user experience designer, definitely inspired me. I know that one day I will enter inside a virtual experience designed by her, just like she entered in ‘The Village’ a few days ago.
Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !
