Inspiration
One of our original inspirations was the board game Wavelength. We wanted to open dialogue and have players confront the complexity of their decisionmaking when it comes to everything from what kind of milk alternative they are going to buy (e.g. considering cost, health, and sustainability all at once instead of as individual decisions) to why they love their favorite Pokémon (e.g. a balance of cuteness, strength, and rarity). This can influence peoples' purchases, philosophies, and help understand each other and build communities, and we have utilized the affordances of a collaborative XR experience in the Apple Vision Pro to create this experience.
What it does
TierSpace is a 3D social guessing game where opinions become coordinates. The original gamemode was "2 Player Coop", where users take turns plotting concepts and objects using a wide range of characteristics in 3d space to predict how each other thinks, and discover how close (or far apart) your assumptions really are. The closer your perspectives align, the more you win.
There are various gamemodes in development, but one we showcased that we are particularly proud of is is also a _competitive mode where players compete to try to get closer to an AI evaluation of the concepts. Can you think like an AI? We believe the summation of the corpus of data that Apple's onboard LLM is trained on is, representative of the "average, informed human's priorities". In this gamemode, first, players come up with any noun or concept they want to analyze. Then, the onboard LLM finds 3 axes that would be interesting metrics of discussion around your choice, and it quantitatively evaluates your topic accordingly. Both players guess what the AI is thinking, and you score more points according to who gets closest.
It shows great potential for sustainability awareness and inspiring people to make greener choices.
Example: ranking modes of transportation across 3 axes - speed, cost, carbon emissions - and then checking the correct answer, and realising that airplanes have way more emissions than one thought, and so on.
How we built it
We coded in native Swift, using XCode for Apple Vision Pro and the SharePlay functionality to enable collaborative play.
Challenges we ran into
- Some technical challenges: connecting XCode to the Apple Vision Pro, and making the SharePlay functionalities work.
- Scope creep: even though at its core it’s a simple idea, it is infinitely extendable, so we really needed to focus on narrowing the scope to what would be achievable in the short time available.
- Understanding spatial best practices when it came to making an experience quickly understandable and easily usable.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Making a working game in just 2 days!
- Keeping our cool even when the deadline is approaching.
- Keeping an organized codebase, documentation, and having a constant stream of user testers coming up with more and more ways that they were excited to see this incorporated into the future
What we learned
- How to develop in XCode for the Apple Vision Pro
- More about the interaction design and affordances of the Apple Vision Pro (some of us had never used one before)
- How to work in iterations, prioritizing core features first, and how to define concrete, fair rules for a game.
What's next for TierSpace
Adding more game modes, like:
- Quiz mode (for educators)
- Matchmaking mode: platonic or romantic analysis on philosophies of life and lifestyle, like a personality test to meet people that think like you.
- One Vs. Many for entertainment platforms like live streamers on Twitch or YouTube where they can poll their audience for both researching what content their fanbases like best as well as it being content in and of itself
- Political and consulting priority "ranked choice" voting (e.g. a community or enterprise using it to graphically understand how they should allocate time and resources in development of both public and private infrastructure)
- Community-uploaded lists of things to rank, and dimensions to rank them on. Museum-view-- Ability to see how all previous users ranked the same items - see how you compare to everyone else.
- and more!
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