DIBUG
Providing primary school students with more enjoyable learning experience on basic chip repair with the interactions in the virtual environment
My Role
Game design, 3D modeling, user testing
Team
3 Designers
Tools
Unity, Rhino,
Adobe Premiere, After Effects
Timeline
8 Weeks = Research * 1 + Design * 3 + Prototyping * 4
Results
Gold Prize winner of the National Engineering Training Competition
Overview
What is it?
DIBUG is a VR game that aims to provide primary school students with more enjoyable learning on basic chip repair knowledge through visual and auditory adventures. It was awarded the Gold Prize of the National Engineering Training Competition.
Background
Why young students?
Since the summer of 2018, I have been volunteering at Lufei Kui Library in Zhejiang to share my experience and ideas with younger people. Our team, consisting of 8 college students, taught primary and middle school students on science, technologies, languages and art.
Primary school students always had good questions. When we introduced integrated circuit as a very tiny world, they kept asking us if they could go into that world themselves. And I said, sure.
Why IC knowledge?
There is a large talent gap in Chinese integrated circuit industry in 2020. The industry needs to attract more potential talents. The current ways to popularize knowlege of integrated circuit are mainly passive processes, and students do not proactively explore for IC knowledge.
Ideation
What did the students say?
A group of students played the role of Ultramen who had just sealed a large evil monster inside the circuit board.
Defining the design goal
Based on the 3 problems I knew from the primary school students, we decided to build a VR game where young students learn about basic IC knowledge actively and easily.
Designing the characters
In this game called DIBUG, the engineer is always trying to fix/kill the bugs, while the bugs are destroying components in the factory to annoy the engineer.
Storyboard
In 2048, brain-computer interface technologies made rapid progress, and human minds could enter micro spaces. DIBUG IC Inc. founded a chip lab committed to making full use of human brain to repair intelligent chips. You were the subject of their first experiment.
The player takes on the role of engineer, accidentally trapped inside the chip. The engineer will learn about knowledge of chip repair to recover everything destroyed by bugs, to kill all bugs in the chip and to get the chip working again before escaping from it.
Prototyping & testing
Game iterations
The most unexpected problem we encountered occurred the moment we put VR headsets on: it was too dizzy to look at arrow guidance! Apparently our brain’s comprehension conflicted with our perception, causing nauseous that hindered the user experience. As it was more of a hardware problem and hard to avoid, again as the group leader I proposed to use stereophonic audio guidance instead. The users were unexpectedly excited about this modification!
Four rounds of user testing
