Description & Motivation
This virtual reality experience leverages the telepresence and takes the user back to about 2600 B.C, and lets user be a part of the Egyptian mummification process. Egyptian era is notable for it's mesmerizing monuments, pyramids, ancient burial processes and many other things that people still awe about. The ancient Egyptians maintained an elaborate set of burial customs that they believed were necessary to ensure immortality after death. These customs involved preserving the body by mummification, performing burial ceremonies, and interring with the body goods the deceased would use in the afterlife. We decided to let people experience this via a virtual reality tour, where user will be teleported back in time to the ancient Egyptian era and will be able to virtually perform the mummification rituals. Our main motive behind this was to teach user these rituals through audio-visual senses. This immersive VR experience can be deployed to Google Cardboard or Oculus Rift. It is developed using Unity 3D Gaming Engine. This project was developed as a class project for the Virtual Reality (CIS6930) class at University of Florida.
The team consists of 3 graduate students:
Izhar Shaikh (https://github.com/its-izhar)
Sayak Biswas (https://github.com/sayakbiswas)
Spandana Gangisetty (https://github.com/spandananitdgp)
Video Link
Learning Objective
After this VR experience users will be able to comprehend the complete mummification process according to the rituals of 2600 B.C Egyptians.
How elements in the experience increased the user Sense of Presence?
- Directional audio : Instead of using GUIs in the virtual environment we used directional audio to help the user with navigation and since it is relevant to the time of the scene to increase Sense of Presence
- Teleportation from Transitional Environment to Virtual Environment : As described in the research paper by Eric Ragan et. al. (Studying the Effects of Stereo, Head Tracking, and Field of Regard on a Small-Scale Spatial Judgment Task) a transition from a Transitional Environment to the Virtual Environment before starting the actual VR experience significantly increases the subjective and behavioral measures of Sense of Presence. We have effectively utilized this fact in our VR experience by transporting the user from a replica of the laboratory, where the experiment is being conducted to and back from the Egyptian scene through a portal.
- First person active user interaction : Since the user himself is the one who is actively performing the mummification ritual and interacting with the objects in the environment, his sense of being "there" is significantly higher when compared to a third person user perspective.
- Elimination of user interaction with experimenter by introducing audio instructions : Throughout the experience the user need not interact with the experimenter as all the instructions for both navigation and steps for performing mummification are incorporated as the part of the audio effects throughout the experience.
How the Intro and Outro increased the users' Sense of Presence?
Intro - Scientists Open Egyptian Mummy Coffin in Chicago
- Intro and outro have significantly impacted the users' sense of presence which we have described as follows :
- Users were more comfortable with interacting with objects and navigating through the experience.
- Participants stated that their experience was more "complete"
- Intro added to the familiarity with the environment. Hence, learning objective was more likely to be satisfied and this was verified by the results stated below.
Outro - When user exited the portal in virtual environment and came back to transitional environment, he picked up a souvenir from the scene which he/she also received in real environment as soon as he/she took of the HMD. This increased user's Sense of Presence by considerable amount.
Results
We did this experiment with 6 participants randomly chosen from University of Florida. The following procedure was followed:
- We asked all of the participants about their previous knowledge of the learning objective (i.e. the mummification process) as described in question 7.
- We chose 3 participants out of 6, to whom we gave an intro and outro and other 3 participants did not receive it.
- We completed the experiment with all of them and it took approx. 5 minutes for the experiment with intro and outro and virtual experience, whereas it took approx. 4 minutes for the experiments without the intro and outro.
- We accumulated the results and calculated the mean for all questions and concluded results and verified our learning objective.
After our survey we found that people who were given intro and outro had a much more sense of being in Egypt when compared to those who were not given intro and outro. Also, former were more comfortable in the environment than the later.
Analysis of "Sense of Presence"
Question 1: Please rate your sense of being in the Egypt VR, on the following scale from 1 to 7, where 7 represents your normal experience of being in a place. (Average - 6)
As you can see in the project we have implemented directional audio and also added intro and outro to increase the SOP of a person and it gave us an average rating of 6 for the above question
Question 2: To what extent were there times during the experience when the Egypt VR was the reality for you? (Average - 5.83)
We have implemented this experience in first person perspective so that the user feels connected to the environment throughout the VR experience which makes the user feel it is more towards reality than a virtual experience.
Question 3: When you think back about your experience, do you think of the Egypt VR more as images that you saw, or more as somewhere that you visited? (Average - 6.5)
Since the user enters the virtual environment via a transitional environment, he /she felt that they have visited some place than the experience just being a compilation of set of images.
Question 4: During the time of the experience, which was strongest on the whole, your sense of being in the Egypt VR, or of being elsewhere? (Average - 4.5)
Participants who experienced intro and outro gave rating > 4 i.e, their sense of being in Egypt was high whereas participants who were not shown the intro and outro gave rating < 4. This concludes that intro and outro had a significant effect on a user's Sense of Presence.
Question 5: Consider your memory of previous movies/ documentaries you have watched about egypt/pyramid/mummies. How similar in terms of that structure is this structure in the experience you have been today? (Average - 4.83)
Majority of the participants found that their VR experience of Egypt was closer to what they have previously seen in movies or documentaries.
Question 6: During the time of the experience, did you often think to yourself that you were actually in the Egypt VR? (Average - 5.5)
Since the users were given instructions to navigate and perform the mummification process by audio instructions, they had no need to interact with the experimenter which in turn made them think that they were actually in the Egypt.
Education of Evaluation
As you can read in the section explaining the questionnaire, question no. 7 asks participants to rate their ‘prior’ knowledge about the Egyptian culture and Mummification process in general on a 5-point Likert Scale, where 5 indicates that user has competent knowledge in this domain and 1 indicates has no significant knowledge.
We asked all of our participants this question and the mean of the user rating for this question turned out to be 1.6, as is it visible from the graph, which indeed indicates the fact that all of the participants did not possess strong knowledge about mummification process.
After the VR experience was over, we asked user question no. 8 and discovered that the overall mean was increased by about 1.7 points (i.e. previously 1.6, new 3.3), which indicates that there was significant overall improvement in the education objective. Thus, from this experiment, it is evident that our learning objective was successfully achieved.
Source Code and Executable
- Source Code - https://github.com/spandananitdgp/Egyptian-Mummification-VR-Experience
- Executable - https://www.dropbox.com/s/aurketq7fwk5ox0/MummifyVR%20v2.3.apk?dl=0
References
Egypt Thomb Asset From Krzysztof J. https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/36586
Medieval Props Pack https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/41540
STEVEN HALPERN Cymatic Imagery of Sacred Chant recorded Inside the Great Pyramid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw13EAX3cZk
Fire SFX https://www.freesoundeffects.com/free-track/fire2-89307/
Sand Falling SFX http://www.freesfx.co.uk/soundeffects/dirt_sand/
PS4 Joystick Unity Mapping Tutorial by John Brown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkRWyxMhNak http://postimg.org/image/s3nazp8bn/
Mouse Squeak SFX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTWI_k7jhC8
Makehuman Skin http://o4saken.deviantart.com/art/Make-human-detailed-skin-573978821
Brain Model http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/brain-max-free/833681
Lung Model http://opengameart.org/content/human-lungs
Props for the Classroom https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/5977
Intestines http://3dlancer.net/en/3dmodel-the-intestines-4883
Heart http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/791469
Sarcophagus Lid Slide Audio http://www.freesfx.co.uk/download/?type=mp3&id=3990
Table Texture http://www.photos-public-domain.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/gray-heather-knit-t-shit-fabric-texture.jpg
CPU Tower model http://tf3dm.com/download-page.php?url=coolermaster-pc-tower-78096
Keyboard Model https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model.html?id=bde7724c6a2c984d4c7427583b874cf1
Mouse Model https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model.html?id=90490d506c40f6b344ebbc705ad8c07
Oculus Model https://sketchfab.com/models/591ff55a0f7b401cbb14fe454175b8b2
Cardboard Model https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model.html?id=u1cde2645-142f-4c6d-a8e5-3a49331aa2db
Portal Texture http://www.stephenmeli.net/images/eventhorizon.jpg
Simple Particle Ribbon https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/42866
Portal sounds https://freesound.org/people/northern87/sounds/88532/ https://freesound.org/people/Cyberkineticfilms/sounds/135435/
