It would be great to have your thoughts and feedback. As you can see, we are approaching the corporate market. The demo is a self promo piece looking to demonstrate to companies the benefit of putting themselves out there in an experiential environment.
I think the service you offer is really neat. After looking around I found the controls to be the worst part. I would offer “Keyboard” and “Mouse” options, get rid of the navigation circle thing, not only does it get in the way of some displayed text but personally I think its the most confusing method to use.
With the keyboard strafing shouldn’t be a movement option, simply make right and left turn/rotate the virtual user. Have a dedicated button for “interaction” so when the user is close to anything a label can appear saying “Press X to Interact”
With the mouse I’d keep using the point’n’click to move but allow the cursor floating on the edge of the screen to rotate the view. If using a mouse and clicking on a distant object I wouldn’t instantly teleport them to a position but make the virtual user pathfind and have a small GUI button pop up allowing them to instant travel if they want.
If you target corporate managers, bosses, in my experience most/some of them
dont know much about computers…so the controls have to be su-per-ea-sy!
other comments,
Add mouseover effect or cursor change on the movement panel arrows, make it bigger also. (and darker/stronger color)
Minimap (with compass, viewing direction)
Those help/info walls (like in rotate turbo), make it more clear, bigger fonts
(some might use video projectors or laptops at <1280x)
maybe even as separate text panel gui (instead of bend 3D wall…)
if you click on ground and start walking, add some target marker
Its interesting as we spent ages trying to get the right control set. We originally were going with your ideas of more mouse and keyboard controls but following research we found that corporate people were not naturally comfortable with this, especially mouse look. Gamers are a lot easier to design for!
Yes, the navigation roundal is a compromise and negative in some aspects. Until we have had a large corporate usage and feedback positive or negative, we cannot conclude what is the best idea.
Bigger text, yes I think your right in hindsight :-p Map and help, yes (we have this on our other client project - should have it on here too)
We will reply to the community if we get any conclusive info on how non gamers like to navigate.
Anymore feedback from others would be very helpful
