Alone Together

Inspiration

We were inspired by a study we recently read which found that 80% of Americans under 18 years of age and almost 40% of adults report being lonely, which is associated with increased risk in suicide, Alzheimer's, and impaired cognitive performance. Especially since the start of the pandemic, loneliness has been a growing epidemic, but most people are not comfortable with the idea of reaching out to their loved ones and providing safe/loving social encounters, through their presence. We built a VR experience that promotes positive social interactions to empower people to reach out and get the help they need.

What it does

Alone Together is a multiplayer VR game in which one player is randomly designated ‘Seeker’ and everybody else as ‘Hider.’ All players are placed throughout a dimly lit warehouse with various interesting obstacles littering their paths. It is the goal of the seeker to find and catch all the ‘Hiders’ before the countdown is up.

The twist, however, is that all the Hiders are invisible and the Seekers must find the Hiders based off of spatial audio cues. Additionally, once the Seeker finds a Hider they perform a ‘Hug’ making the Hider visible and converting them into a ‘Seeker’ who can now help find other Hiders. This is representative of the power of community building, which has been shown to curtail the negative health outcomes of loneliness. By transforming reaching out and hugging other players into a positive and fun experience, we hope that individuals feel more empowered to do the same in real life.

Once the game is over, and all Hiders have been found or the clock runs out- everybody is transported to a beautiful green meadow to enjoy each others' presence and relax post-game in anticipation of the next round.

How we built it

Initially, we built the game using the XR interaction toolkit to create hand gestures, movements, and more and Unity Netcore for multiplayer. However, we ran into compatibility issues and switched to the Oculus VR Integration package paired with Normcore for multiplayer.

We used ShapesXR extensively for all of our prototyping, and ended up exporting a beautiful warehouse which is the main scene for our game. The process

We used Normcore for the multiplayer and networking aspects of the game along with the Unity asset store and Sketchfab to search for assets. For game development, we picked Unity as our game engine/editor and wrote all our scripts in C#.

Challenges we ran into

The most salient challenge we ran into was losing our teammate, Morgan, who unfortunately got in a car accident during the first night of the hackathon (luckily he is okay! Taking a few days off to recover). He was our team leader and the only developer on the team that had any experience building VR projects in Unity, so losing his expertise was a real blow to the team’s morale and project scope.

Another issue we ran into was that Normcore’s servers are blocked on the MIT network, but we had no idea this was an issue. As such, we kept getting OpenSSL errors in Unity that were very difficult to debug and trace back due to the package’s large networking codebase. We finally realized a few hours later when on hotspot that this was the issue. Additionally, we had faith in the OpenXR packages playing nice with the Oculus but after a few hours of debugging why our project wouldn’t build we realized it was taking up too much of our time which prompted us to switch to only support the Quest 2.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of our team’s persistence in the face of overwhelming circumstances, as well as all the domain knowledge we gained this weekend in VR, prototyping with ShapesXR, and Unity. We also all gained new and unique insights into topics such as the blockchain's integration in XR, team management, and the simple power of presence.

What we learned

You can’t save the world in 3 days, but it’s very fun to try! We also learned through our research and through the building of this how powerful presence can be for people's mental and physical health.

What's next for Alone Together

"Alone Together" - A multiplayer VR hide and seek game for those seeking connection and excitement. The next step is to making the multi-player work smoothly as an engaging and immersive experience that can help to distract people from feelings of loneliness and isolation, through the power of your friends' presence.