MIRAGE – Making Illusion Research Accessible, Gameful, and Engaging

Short Description

Note: While this text is written in English, the working language in the project can be German or English.

VR illusion techniques are among the most fascinating results of VR research: they play with the user's perception — often without users even noticing — to overcome fundamental limitations of virtual reality. Yet outside the research community, hardly anyone ever gets to experience them.

The goal of this project is to change that. Building on the existing Museum of Virtual Reality Illusions (MoVRI) — a running Meta Quest 3 application developed in previous projects — the team will turn a working prototype into a polished, playable and well-tested experience: with new interactive content, small illusion mini-games, and a user experience that lets newcomers explore the world of VR illusions without any prior knowledge. The result will be released as an open-source application, so that it can be used as a demo and teaching tool by anyone interested in VR illusions.

Since the technical foundation already exists and runs on current hardware, the team can focus on what actually reaches users: content, interaction design, usability, and polish.

MoVRI video (an older version than the one used in the project): https://youtu.be/sASIswQuP7U?si=JwLmwPtStCC6kutO

Tasks

The goal of VR systems in general is to simulate artificial realities for training, education, entertainment, or other purposes. However, a range of different challenges makes implementing VR applications difficult — for example, the tracking space in which the user can move around in the real world might be limited, users might reach out to touch virtual objects but only find thin air, or properties of virtual objects interacted with could not be perceived (e.g. objects might feel weight-less).

To solve these (and several other challenges), VR researchers have come up with VR illusion techniques that play with the user's perception. Examples of such techniques are Redirected Walking, Change Blindness Redirection, Redirected Touching, Haptic Retargeting, Hand Redirection, or Pseudo-Haptic Feedback.

While all these techniques are documented in research papers, reading about them is no substitute for experiencing them. MoVRI already makes several of them tangible in VR — but as a research prototype it offers limited content, and its exhibits are demonstrations rather than experiences people want to spend time with. This project takes the existing system as a starting point and develops it into a self-contained application that can be handed to anyone: at an open house day, in a lecture, or by downloading it from a public repository.

The goal of this project is to:

1. Understand the existing MoVRI application and the VR illusion techniques it implements. The supervisors provide the current code base (Unity, Meta Quest 3), the corresponding research papers, and further material.

2. Conceptualize new content for the museum. This includes small illusion mini-games and playful challenges built around existing illusions (e.g. can the user detect when they are being redirected?), engaging exhibits and experiences, and — optionally — one or two additional illusion techniques from the literature. The team develops and discusses these concepts with the supervisors and decides which ones to realize.

3. Implement the selected content in the existing application. The modular structure of MoVRI should be preserved and, where useful, improved, so that further illusions and exhibits can be added by others later on.

4. Design the overall visitor experience: onboarding for users who have never worn a headset, guidance through the museum, in-application explanations of what each illusion does and why it works, and a coherent look and feel across all exhibits.

5. Test and Refine the application through a usability study with participants who are new to VR. Findings are fed back into the design, and the application is hardened so that it runs reliably in unsupervised demo situations.

6. Release the result as an open-source project: a public repository, a ready-to-install build, and documentation that enables others (e.g. lecturers) to use, present, and extend the museum.

Prior experience with Unity and C# is helpful; experience with VR development is welcome but not required. All necessary hardware (Meta Quest 3) will be provided.