FireFly Island

Introduction

Firefly Island is a social VR world focused on exploring how social VR can be used to facilitate intimate and meaningful connections between people. There is This project was part of a self-initiated project of Savio Menifer’s for his master's thesis partially inspired by a previous VPRO Tegenlicht Pioneering 2020 nominee experience Virtual Stargazing. The project used a Research through Design approach to investigate how people played and how social intimacy could be stimulated.

Interested in collaborating on research on Social VR please contact Robby or have a look at the thesis of Savio for more information.

Title of the Project: Firefly Island

Version/Date: Ported to Resonite

Requirements

List the hardware, software, and any other necessary resources required to complete the project.

• Hardware: 2x VR ready laptop, 2x VR setup, space:co-located or distributed
• Software: Steam VR or similar, Resonite

Contributions

The project was self-initiated by Savio Menifer after a joined project (including Jesse Lohman and others) during Covid for what is now known as the Experience Design for Interaction course. Joris Weijdom at that time a PhD-candidate at HMI, and lecturer, Artist and research affiliated with HKU also helped out, including experience-design related elements and introducing Savio to some of the what was then NEOS VR community. Robby van Delden was his daily supervisor and Dirk Heylen was part of both the course and thesis assessment committee.

Savio made smart use of existing assets for some of the core parts of the experience (see Attribution), he held focus groups in VR Chat to discuss how intimacy and overall friendship were facilitated by VR-specific elements. Savio then built on such social VR specific VR affordances. This includes, making yourself invisible (incorporated in a gamified hide and seek game including catching enough fireflies, notice the sounds, to trigger invisibility for the hider or showing for the seeker, instructions are part of the world), using proximity responsive triggers (two witch hats that can light up and a selfie-mirror to trigger literally getting close, flowers can be plucked infinitely and then used as additional decoration), building and saving physical parts (2 huge jars with artistic brushes), randomized emoticon phishing for playful conversations (lines of two phishing rods can be lowered into the water at the peer by rotating the handle), child-memory related virtual representations (such as a campfire including roasting marshmallows), aesthetically pleasing use of lights (floating latterns), and beyond-realistic cross-species capabilities (a speech-receptive magical tree that grows on conversation). Some of these elements seem to build a connection to the space itself which might also facilitate relatedness, such as floating/swimming locomotion in the water, the campfire, the nightly scene etc.

This project was finished before the interaction lab was initiated, it provided an interesting demo of the capabilities of Social VR, and was a good starting point for our ongoing collaboration with Resonite as a platform and company.

Instructions

Prepare 2 HMD-based VR setups. Be sure these are physically either close enough to hear each other’s speech directly (and mute the in-game microphones in Game top-left) or far enough to have no ego. Depending on the setup one can choose to use noise-cancellation headphones.

On the most powerful VR setup Open Resonite, login to an (Interaction Lab) account with a friend account (or set this up, see Resonite tutorial and documentation), open Dash menu (https://wiki.resonite.com/Basic_Controls), go to Worlds, for quick search in left open Educational, if needed type in search bar Firefly Island By dekatron, and Start Session. You probably only want the contacts to be able to join so launch the session as private (invite only) or in the UT Universe (see Resonite instructions for launching sessions).

Open dash, go to contacts, click on the contact that will join the session and click invite here (you might need to resend the invite or send it after the other account is also setup. On the other account login. Go to contacts, click on the account of the most powerful VR setup and in the right chat click on join.

Do’s & Don’ts:

• Be sure to have only one world open, you can run multiple instances and switch between them but this leads to lower FPS
• Familiarize the users with general controls, including locomotion, before entering VR
• Especially for those sensitive to motion sickness: don’t jump or fly.
• Test audio before letting people put on the headsets.
• Don’t explain in detail what they will experience but feel free to guide them to see the parts that suits them best and explain how this is Social-VR specific
• If you did not do open a private session (or do not know how to), nor used the UT universe, nor a LAN session (see notes), you might get other players joining, you can ask them to leave or remove them from the session.

Note

There are specific instructions to join the UT Universe, these will be shared through personal email/interaction lab. These instructions include a small JSON file which you need to add in your local file directory to use this universe. For more information visit: https://wiki.resonite.com/Basic_Controls. If you are at a location without a proper adjustable network (including some eduroam sessions) you might try to setup a local server: https://wiki.resonite.com/LAN_Sessions Be careful with kicking players due to inaccurately setup sessions, it is considere rather rude to kick-out people without explanation. The other way aroundif people keep on coming back consider banning them from your world’s session https://wiki.resonite.com/Moderation

Project pictures and Screenshots

Include screenshots of the project in action, highlighting its key features and functionalities.

Screenshot 1 ← Replace screenshot1_url with the actual URL of your screenshot
Screenshot 2 ← Replace screenshot2_url with the actual URL of your screenshot

Code

The code behind this World is owned by Savio Menifer. He can provide you an editable copy for specific reasons. The code is written in visual programming language LogiX in NeosVR and then ported to Resonite, due to this some parts might not work as they did in the original version.

Conclusion

The research provided design elements and vocabulary that could aid and inspire other designers to design for social connection in social VR. This provides a nice example of how a Research through Design process, with a relatively new medium, provides knowledge both in the shape of design principles like the proximity-sensitive objects accompanied by specific examples, some other examples that were closer to related work, some remediated, and yet others deal with current practices discovered through the design process.

Attribution

Menifer, Savio (2022) Firefly Island: Exploring intimacy in social VR. University of Twente, the Netherlands, https://essay.utwente.nl/89341/ Menifer, Savio (2023) Firefly Island A social VR world designed for intimacy and close connection in VR, in Portfolio https://savi.ooo/work/fireflyisland
Interaction Lab