Projects

XOO

XOO is an outdoor game service designed to help the youngers form healthy habits after the epidemic. It builds an audio real world with spatial voice interaction and creates a sustainable loop to benefit both the players and threatened animals.

Innovative

STUDENTS INVOLVED

Xiwen Zhu

Bowen Shi

Yuhan Luo

Junyi Cao

Yinxuan Zhou

ABOUT

Modal

Beyond the screen: Voice-led experiences for the low touch economy

COVID-19 is a major theme in 2020. As a key technology trend, voice interaction provides new options for healthy living in the post-epidemic era. The physical and mental toll on people during the epidemic is enormous. "Increased social isolation, loneliness, health anxiety, stress and an economic downturn are a perfect storm to harm people's mental health and wellbeing," said Prof Rory O'Connor from the University of Glasgow. Therefore, in the Chinese context, we hope to help citizens suffering from COVID-19 to overcome the tough period by making full use of voice interaction technology. At the meantime, it is of great value to explore boundaries of voice interaction for developing more possibilities for healthy living.

Impact of COVID-19 on human resources

"On average, it takes more than 2 months before a new behaviour becomes automatic. This means that self-isolation may lead to significant changes in our behavioural habits." COVID-19 hits the world and brings profound impacts which makes us more curious about how the far-reaching changes happen in humans’ life and leads us to focus on the special phenomenon about behaviour sequelae in the post-epidemic era. The project is based in China, focusing on people’s socialising and behaving. Then we take all these points as our fundamental background and go to analyse the scene and the trend. From indoor to outdoor, we chose parks as our main place because people cannot go for a long trip during this period. A visit to the park is a short trip for people, we did field research in 7 parks in 3 cities to discover the specific scene.

Insights about humans in the Post-COVID world

According to abundant field research, we've got 3 main interesting insights: 1. Strategies like quarantine that are necessary to minimise viral spread can have a negative psychological and physical impact, such as causing post-traumatic stress symptoms, depression, and insomnia. These problems can last longer than the epidemic. 2. After the epidemic, people are suffering from discomfort physically and psychologically. When facing health and psychological insecurity, people tried to make changes with exercise, but sticking to an exercise program is not easy. 3. One severe problem that socialising online can cause is that it can be harmful to real-life relationships. As a result of this, existing relationships with the people who are more important in our lives have been ignored, and people are becoming distant from each other.

Recovery with XOO

It is time to change! Going from indoor to outdoor, immersing yourself in the natural environment with the brand-new game service based in urban parks. XOO：X represents an infinite possibility, and it also means the natural world is unknown until we listen to it carefully. With simple actions, users can form healthier habits during the process of guarding threatened animals, connect with nature, and then liberate themselves from the closed and repressed state.

Refresh players' experience with spatial voice tech

With object-based spatial audio technology, users can enter a magical world built by spatial voice. By using a headset with a built-in gyroscope, the system will analyse the relative position and distance between you and the virtual sound source. For example, you will feel the birds singing above your head, and the frogs croak beside your foot… Dark night can magnify the acuity of players’ hearing senses. At this moment, the screen is no longer important. Just focusing on what you hear~~~ Feeling it and experiencing it in a completely new way!

Test and prototype to build back better

For players, a channel connecting nature is created to recover themselves from mental and physical depression after COVID-19, meanwhile in the way of showing additional value by taking part in social responsibility project. We make the rewards visible for players to encourage them to continue playing with it, which is an adhesive for our game service. For XOO company, their capital source is from app and advertisement fees from related enterprises, where 20% of the input will be donated to environmental charities for the manifestation of social concern. For other enterprises, it is a good chance to show their social responsibility and raise public awareness as a new market entry at the same time. As for the testing and prototyping part, we created animal sounds to track their response, interviewed our target group to understand their interests, and invited people to test the feasibility of the game.

Projects

XOO

Insights about humans in the Post-COVID world

Recovery with XOO

students involved on the project