Fit for German
Language learning app.
Team
- Unity developer
- XR designer (me)
My Role
- Concept creation
- Prototyping
- UI design
- Animations
- Environment design
- Sound design
Tools
- Miro
- ShapesXR
- Figma
- Blender
- Dall-E 3
Timeframe
2 months
Challenge
Problem
- Active language learners struggle with maintaining focus when practicing large and repetitive theories, such as articles in German or irregular verbs in English.
Goals
- Create an engaging experience that uses the benefits of XR to enhance language learning.
- Start by creating a polished single-player MVP for practicing German articles at B1-B2 levels in language schools.
Requirements
- Gamify the experience to make the learning process engaging.
- Provide adjustable physical difficulty and automatic learning difficulty increase for each noun.
- Provide a frequent repetition of correct responses without penalizing mistakes.
- Include physical movement, 3D visuals, and spatial auditory cues.
- Provide a monolingual interface with no textual explanations.
- The solution should be scalable for different amounts of answer options, grammar rules, and languages.
Constraints
- Project budget
- 2 months of work time
Design Process
- Research
- Ideation
- Feedback session 1
- Prototyping
- Feedback session 2
- Design
- Feedback session 3
Research
Competitor analysis showed that most B2C language learning VR apps focus on vocabulary building and listening/speaking practice in different scenarios. I noted Noun Town’s well-implemented gamification and Language Lab’s professional repetition technique.
I also tried popular fitness and rhythm VR games. The most successful concept involved reacting to objects flying towards you by matching the rhythm of the music.
I summarized 3 selection mechanics in a VR game for choosing one answer from several offered:
Body movement. The player physically moves into the zones representing answers.
Object movement. The player moves an object into the zones representing answers.
Object marking. The player marks an object with a chosen answer.
Ideation
The client sent me a document with initial ideas for a game concept. The goal of the concept was to turn repetitive choosing the correct article for German nouns into an engaging game.
Having in mind the researched selection mechanics, 3 answer options for German articles, scalability, existing successful game mechanics, repeatability, and the fitness theme of the app, I generated several concept ideas based on different sports.
The concept ideas presented helped the client refine and share their vision for the game. During the feedback session, 4 concepts were selected for further iteration.
Prototyping
To ensure the game concepts are fluent and engaging, I created low-fidelity VR prototypes in ShapesXR for each idea. I also shared prototypes with the client so they could try them out in VR.
The VR prototypes helped the product team and the client to gain insight into the gameplay, better understand the benefits and limitations of each game concept, and decide on the final one to proceed with.
- An engaging concept should put the player in a state of flow without interruption.
- Remote article selection allows us to measure the reaction time of the player and use it in scoring.
- Repeatedly choosing an article for the same noun does not contribute to the learning process.
- Choosing the right article should not follow the rhythm of the music, since the duration of the decision for each noun is unpredictable.
- The boxing concept requires the introduction of an unobvious movement to select the third article since people only have 2 hands.
- The squash concept is engaging, but technically difficult due to the directions of the strike and the movement of the ball.
Design
Having defined the game concept, the developer and I broke the application down into components, confirmed them with the client, and distributed their creation among ourselves. The first version of the application is currently being designed/developed.
Outcome
This project is not finished yet.
