Measuring the effect character

Procedural Animation has on immersion levels in a virtual environment.

Kyle McAlinden

Word count: 8050

Abbreviations

Throughout this dissertation, many of these terms will be referred to multiple times. This is for ease of reading:

NPCC- non-procedural character controller

PCC- procedural character controller

NPA- non-procedural animation

PA- procedural animation

1. Introduction

This research project will investigate the uses of procedural Animation (PA) on a character in a 3D virtual environment and how procedural animation methods enhance the levels of immersion in an interactive environment. The research will use the Unity game engine to create the application, with animation being from 3rd party animation sources such as Mixamo, Unity asset store, etc , and PA being made in Unity, utilising the Unity Animation Rigging package. The expected outcome of this research is that procedural animation enhances immersion levels in a 3D virtual environment.

1.1. Research Context and Rationale

PA is the process of creating animation calculated from a set of parameters instead of creating each keyframe by hand (Isikguner, 2014). In real-time applications, there are many ways of creating animation but two ways to produce animation, that are relevant for this project are:

Keyframe and procedural Keyframe is essentially animating by hand. Procedural can use completely maths independently, and a blend of keyframed animation. A common use of PA is inverse kinematics or IK, which essentially animates a leg for example, from the movements of the foot and makes the rest of the leg react to those movement, in contrast with keyframe, where the animations comes from the higher bones in the chain such as the thigh to animate the leg and goes down the leg. In the broader games community, PA is used in these ways and others. A game that utilises this is the game series, 'Assassin's Creed,' especially Assassin's Creed Unity (Ubisoft, 2014). Ubisoft uses PA to help with how the main characters interact with the environment and other non-playable characters in the game environment. PA is often used in games and other real-time applications; however, this research aims to explore if using PA is worthwhile for AAA developers and smaller (indie) game studios to endeavour as it will make their games and experience more immersive and believable.

Immersion in games is difficult to define. A different person can define immersion differently based on individual "experiences of gamers" (Brown and Cairns, 2004). There are a few different levels of immersion; "engagement, engrossment and total immersion." (Brown and Cairns, 2004)

Immersion is often essential to the enjoyment of a game and can affect how a player interacts with the game. The definition used in this research would be how much the player feels they are in the environment.

1.2. Research Questions

1. Does the use of a character controller with procedural Animation (PCC) enhance immersion levels in a virtual environment?

2. How do PCC workflows compare to NPCC

1.3. Objectives

This project aims to make a small gameplay experience with a virtual environment for a character to move around. The environment will include different terrain types and ground materials that the player can explore, similar to a released game with a similar subject matter. The same environment will be played twice, once with a PCC and once with NPCC. This allows a comparison of character controllers based on a similar environment. Before the start of the experience, the player shouldn't know what experience they are playing until they start traversing the environment. When the participant is finished playing both environments, they will be asked to complete a user evaluation involving a questionnaire asking the same questions for each environment.

1.4. Ethics

At the start of the project, ethics were considered, and an ethics form (which can be viewed in Appendix 7.1) was created and sent to the programme leader. The ethics form was filled into GSA ethics procedures.

This research will only be recording anonymous opinions; therefore, there will be no reason to gather consent forms, as no personal data, such as a person's profile, will not be required to be recorded. This research is based on the opinions and views of people in an anonymous way.

Impairments have also been considered for this research. As the application will require people to be sighted, as animation is a visual aspect of games, people with visual impairments cannot participate in this research.