The Watcher is a VR puzzle game passion project that helped me deepen my understanding of VR, HCI, and semiotics. I wrote a lengthy article on its development and lessons learned available on Linkedin: https://tinyurl.com/y3jzs5ae.

Apart from creating all of the game’s content (excluding the score), one of the key challenges was communicating purely through the use of symbol and interaction. There is no written language in the game telling the player what to do, why, or how. Many portions of the game went through dozens of iterations based on player feedback.

The Watcher was my first major mobile project which involved working with the Android tool-chain, prototyping on the physical device (and in the VR headset), dealing with hardware constraints, and releasing in the Google Play store.

Google Play store page: https://tinyurl.com/yys2k365

I created a prototype to gather initial market research for an annotation-based notes app concept I’m calling Hermes. The prototype covers a small subset of potential functionality—the hotdog of the hotdog stand—but demonstrates the core concept. The prototype is an Electron app written in TypeScript with Vue for rendering and Dexie (IndexedDB) for data. The prototype was a low-fi research tool with no visual design.

Pros

• Key/value annotations enable users to create natural taxonomies on-the-fly.
• Easily move between long-form unstructured content and structured DB-like content.
• Embedding annotations within long-form content enables a bunch of interesting rich interactions
  • For example, imagine a slider at the top of search results that at one end shows no context (default table view) and on the other end shows a lot of context in a narrative format, i.e. “…the user Fred clicked on button…failed to complete the new item task.”

Cons

• User created taxonomies tend toward complexity and messiness, particularly with large teams.

Research

10 participants from a variety of backgrounds participated in concept research. General results were positive. Here’s a bit from the results.