From past experiences, we knew the importance of having a winning idea before anything. We began our ideation process by penning down words related to ‘Cloud’ and studying the capabilities of the VR headsets (HTC Vive Pro) and the SDKs that were provided. We spent the first evening brainstorming and our final insights came from looking at images of clouds online.
A cloud is unique in that it is formless and we based our project on the idea that people imagine different things when they look at clouds in the sky.
Another key aspect would be utilizing the technology provided for us. We employed the Hand-tracking feature to use the player’s hand as a controller to create an experience as close to the real world as possible; pointing to the sky and clouds.
For the gameplay, we first prompt the player with a word and using their index finger, players will draw with the sky as a ‘canvas’ and clouds as ‘ink’. DoodleCloud will then determine how close the drawing matches the given word by sending their drawings to Google’s Quickdraw backend.
The screencaptures below illustrate the general flow of the game:
We pitched the product as being based on the idea that clouds are formless, the medium of interaction utilizes clouds (the drawing) and lastly, we utilised Google’s QuickDraw dataset, which (arguably) would be accessible through Google Cloud.
Future work
I’m currently in the process of polishing up the project and porting it over to the Oculus Quest headset to showcase it at an upcoming event!