Turning data into play: a gamified VR experience for team away days
VR Vault: The Knowledge Bank
Developed in partnership with Six Agency, “VR Vault: The Knowledge Bank” is a 360° interactive VR experience. Designed to visualise the value of an exciting new business tool, the project transforms abstract data intelligence concepts into a gamified virtual environment that showcases how early adoption of exciting new business technology can directly benefit employees.
The experience was created for a “Team Away Day” for our partner’s end client, enabling senior staff to engage with an immersive world of business insights and compete through an interactive mini-game designed to reinforce key proof points surrounding the new technology.
The project was delivered on a rapid turnaround of just 6 weeks from commission to completion. Despite the tight timeline, the experience included full 360° VR environment development, a gesture-based interaction system, a stereoscoping hologram narrator, and mini-game logic.
Partners
The ‘VR Vault: The Knowledge Bank’ experience was created in partnership with design experts Six Agency, for use at staff training days for their end client, a major high street bank.
Creating an immersive knowledge vault
The experience was designed to introduce senior team members to a new business tool and its potential through a futuristic virtual environment, which transforms complex data analysis concepts into something visually engaging, interactive and memorable.
Accessible via the HTC Vive Focus Vision VR headset, users were able to enter “The Knowledge Bank”. The experience opens in a dark, minimalist space, where a glowing vault door awaits, immediately building anticipation. Standing beside it is the Chief Knowledge Officer, who welcomes participants; voiced by a professional actor, the footage and audio of their performance was integrated into the experience by Zubr.
To achieve this, our graphic design team removed the green screen background from the footage and created a corresponding black-and-white luminance mask, with the actor rendered as a white silhouette against a black background. Within Unity, our developers used a transparent playback feature to interpret this luminance mask, using the white areas to define the visible portions of the footage whilst keying the black areas to transparency. Combined with the actor’s full-colour footage through a custom shader, this technique seamlessly composited the figure into the virtual vault environment.
Designed to be approachable for first-time VR users, hand tracking allows participants to see their own hand movements represented in the virtual environment, creating an immediate sense of presence and embodiment. Users interact with a series of levers and controls through naturalistic gestures, providing a playful, intuitive foundation for the experience.
Introducing gamification
Beyond introducing the new business tool concept, the experience was designed to encourage engagement, conversation and friendly competition during the ‘Team Away Day’.
As users pass through the door and enter the main Knowledge Vault, a backdrop of animated data and dynamic display screens come into view; our developers used animation techniques to create the impression of a ‘live’ environment, where information is constantly evolving.
A competitive mini-game follows; within the space, users encounter floating “glass screen” icons representing various benefits of the new business tool. Using a gesture-based mechanic inspired by the science fiction movie, Minority Report (2002), users cast a beam to “freeze” moving icons. Users have four minutes to “zap and collect” as many benefit icons as possible.
Once captured, each icon reveals a key proof point about the business tool. Users are encouraged to capture all icons as quickly as possible for a record finishing time, encouraging replayability. Although experienced individually, timed results were compared afterwards via an in-person leaderboard system to drive team engagement and discussion, and participants completed evaluation forms to reflect on what they’d learnt in the VR experience.
Attending the event
Zubr also attended the team event to provide on-hand tech support, helping to orient users into the VR experience and monitor the headset boundaries and functionality.
Whilst most attendees tried the experience and completed the VR game, a handful of attendees had repeat goes to try to beat their score, entering into the competitive spirit we hoped the gamification would provide.
In summary
The Knowledge Bank experience successfully transformed complex business tool concepts into an engaging, memorable VR experience. By combining immersive storytelling, intuitive interaction and light-touch gamification, the project made an unfamiliar tool tangible for internal teams whilst encouraging exploration, collaboration and conversation.
Delivered from initial commission to completion in just six weeks, the experience demonstrates how immersive technology can communicate complex ideas quickly, effectively and memorably within a corporate setting.