Wensi's proposal

Objective:

Technical: To learn skill design, and to model and animate a dynamic 3D biological environment for 3D gaming project.

Theoretical: To explore conventional scene design for improving learning process of biological knowledge.

Practical: To provide the basic design for the entire gaming map of lymph node; select one scene from the map and sketch it in detail; model subjects in the scene by Maya; finally, organize them by Unity and experiment with more realistic rendering skills.


Research Questions:

(1) How to organize biological information of an anatomical structure (lymph node) in a form of a 3D environment that can be more user-friendly?

Hypothesis:

• Compare to the anatomical structure which contains millions of closely packed cells/molecules with a variety of scale differences, the design of the gaming environment intends to be organized as a city, countryside or other common real life scenes. It is believed that by creating interactions with the real world, it will strengthen the game by building on users’ pre-existing knowledge of their everyday life. (Horn, 2007). For example, the highway with red pavement will indicate blood vessels; the river with clear water will indicate lymph vessels.

• The downside of using real life scenes to mimic anatomical structure of lymph node is that it may decrease the credibility of scientific material. Although the real life scenes can convey the basic concept of each biological components, such using highway to represent blood vessel as a mean to demonstrate the concept of “transportation path,” some information’s accuracy will be lost, such as the scale proportion of different biological components and the real spatial distance between them.

(2) How to enhance user’s understanding of knowledge by designing a 3D environment of the game?

Hypothesis:

• Continuing from previous point, organizing the game environment as real life scenes may increase usability but also decrease the credibility of scientific material. So in order to enhance user’s understanding of the scientific material, the design of the appearance of each component in game will be closely related to its appearance in the real lymph node. Also, the conventional appearances of these anatomical structures in the textbook or other forms of educational materials will be adopted to help users to make the connection between objects in the 3D environment and biological components. For example, B cell could appear as a round shape fruit on the tree.
• To further enhance user’s understanding of the scientific material, the movements/changes of the objects in 3D environment may simulate the real reaction of the biological components in lymph node. This may help the game to deliver the concept of how biological components function in lymph node. For instance, once the B cell, which appears as a round shape fruit on the tree, is activated by the primary antibody, the Y-shaped secondary antibody will pop out from its surface and the fruit will mature, fall from the tree, and roll around to other places.

• Finally, creating the interaction between the main character and 3D environment may enhance user’s understanding of the scientific material. The main character may trigger events such as bringing an antibody to a non-differentiated B cell (immature fruit in the tree) and activate its differentiating process (fruit maturation process). By doing that, user can gain understanding of the cell’s functional mechanism when they are exploring the anatomical structure of the lymph node.

(3) How to balance out the difficulty level and replay value of the game?

Hypothesis:

• As an interactive 3D environment, the complexity may increase the game’s replay value, because it would offer users extra areas to explore while completing the tasks.

• However, the disadvantage of increasing the complexity of the 3D environment is that it may increase the difficulty level of the game, and hence hindering users from completing the tasks. Therefore, the complexity of the game should balance the difficulty level in order to maximize the replay value of the game.

Discussion:
As one of the essential parts of game creation, the game world development provides the venue for characters to interact with the environment as the storyline unveils. Furthermore, as a scientifically educational game, the game’s environment has its unique contribution to users’ learning process. It will help users to remember anatomical structures more easily as they explore the game world, and it will enhance users’ understanding of the scientific mechanism based on the character-environment interaction.

I hope during the designing and developing process of the game world, I can learn to incorporate scientific content into a visually attractive and entertaining realm of accurately depicted scientific facts. In addition, I will also gain skills of game modeling and texture techniques.