How I Get Started

VR is known for being an immerse, focused, and empathetic learning platform. The mini-game is my experiment to explore how nutrition education can leverage the innovative technology to enrich the learning as interactive and memorable. Whether it be a child or an adult, people don’t like to forcefully do something. Understanding the value of nutrition through eating healthy and tasty food could be the answer to developing healthier habits for people. My goal is to create a fun and comprehensive alternative to widespread approaches to nutrition. In this way, it focuses on the positive aspects of nutrition and healthy eating rather than making people feel as though they are forced to eat a certain way in order to be healthy.

After setting the game’s goal, I started to think about the meaning of cooking because cooking is another way that people interact with food besides from eating. Cooking is about be creative, social, emotional and be organized; It requires skills like agility, creative expression, and strategy thinking. It’s not just a solo experience because sharing food with others is a social act. Serving food can comfort people, and the food itself can become a source of pleasure.

When I researched the current VR cooking landscape from app stores and YouTube, I found a lot of exciting games. Since there are already many interesting VR cooking games in the market, replicating the popular cooking games does not produce much value.
As a result, I decided to focus on the user experience aspect of this application and the dishes planning stage.

Game Experiences

Customer Interaction

Greeting with mood assessment, Customers will be asked how they are feeling in order to establish a baseline of emotions towards nutrition and food preparations for the chef.
No set menu for the restaurants. Chef prepares customized dishes to meet individual nutrition needs.

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Recipe Search

User will browse through a cookbook and brainstorm recipe ideas to meet her customer’s nutritional needs.

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Collecting Ingredients

User uses an inventory system to save and take out the collected ingredients. While colleting ingredients, user can browse each ingredient's nutritional card.

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Collaboration

User divides work with another chef.

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Serve

User serves dishes to the customers and receive their feedback.

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What I have learned

It's quite a learning journey but I think the best way to learn is to learn by doing. Everything 3D-related, spatial design and Unity were brand new to me. Even though I participated in an AR project at Samsung in 2016, the design at the core was 2D screen-based. Meaning utilizing a screen as a foundation to interact with other screens in the space. For example, user can upload a picture to one of the picture frames on a wall by turning on camera view from their phone, identify the picture frame and display their photos. You can check the Memento Project for more details.

I also explored and learned the Unity techniques from hands on practicing, searched solutions online or consulted the Unity expert. During the design phase, I noticed I tend to tackle interaction using the 2D interface solutions. I think it’s because given my product design background in the past few years, there are best practices that I automatically go for. However, I have to remind myself to consider a much more intuitive experience with the VR platform when users no longer limit themselves to a screen.
The book system is a good example to explain this. Overall I have 3 design iterations for the recipe searching experience.

V1: Screen design thinking includes a back button as the menu system which users are familiar with in their daily life.

V2: In order to fully utilize the space, I created a 3 panel interface menu system. I got stuck with the discovery phase struggling with what’s the reasonable connection for users to initiate the recipe searching.

V3: By adding interface-hints, I still consider the experience do not fully touch on the benefits of spatial design. I took a step back to re-consider what’s the real world experience when we look up recipe, and the cookbook is the answer. In real world, we are already familiar with how to interact with a book and what a book can offer. It’s much more intuitive to discover a book and start recipe searching journey than triggering a 3D button to awake an interface. Plus, in a virtual space, I am able to combine the real world physical intuition and the 2D interface benefit, which is adding an interface layer on top of every ingredient.

Note: As an one-person team, I am grateful to find creative commons materials and purchasable assets to focus on building the experience. The 3D models, illustration and part of the scripts' credits from this project can be found here .

Future Roadmap

Experience: More micro-interaction to consider bringing more realist experiences

Game mechanism: Possibility for multi players to increase social elements. Players can play the roles as the chef or the customers. Level up game mechanisms such as increasing the difficulties to solve problems

Customization: How to scale the frameworks so any teachers can easily upload their content materials

Usability Testing: Optimize the game to a level where the game is stable enough to conduct user testing and learn users'feedback