Farmooo

Janice Ng, Henry Lo, Xin Tong, Dr. Diane Gromala & Weina Jin

In order to avoid simsickness (nausea from VR), we used low-resolution & low polygon images. Although VR is widely believed to be better at higher resolution and greater realism, we see it differently. Media study experts explain that differences in an image’s genre or style mean that we’ll both respond to and understand it differently. For example, when you read a book, you imagine what it’s about, but when you see a movie, it’s hard to imagine anything else.)

Description:
Farmooo is a VR game for teenaged cancer patients (ages 14 to 18) who are in-hospital for chemotherapy treatments. In this virtual environment (VE), teens explore, grow edible plants and are accompanied by a delightfully ditzy Companion Cow. Needing to plow, plant, water, and harvest in a comparatively short period —or stroll around to explore the farmland— teens reported that they became distracted from their pain and, surprisingly, their “nausea and loneliness.”

Goal: This VR game aims to gamify pain distraction for hospitalized teens who are experiencing boredom, loneliness and discomfort during chemotherapy treatments and recovery in bed. The team wanted to offer a VR game that might benefit and have meaning for the teen patients, taking into account their physical and psycho-logical context. Two of the designers survived cancer in high school.

Design Approach. The concept of a farm seeks to implicitly symbolize hope and growth for patients, as well as to provide them with everyday encouragement to look outside of themselves by maintaining a farm, interacting with a Companion Cow and enjoying rewarding achievements. 

Co-design. The development team met with 12 teens and ‘alumni’ as well as a nurse at the newly-built Childrens Hospital in Vancouver, Canada to collaborate on the design, to test the limits of the interaction techniques and VR effects, and to ensure that we understood their needs and measured appropriate patient outcomes. The teens reported that their time co-designing led to more interactions afterwards.

Tech. We implemented a low-polygon approach to ensure that the VE didn’t trigger more nausea and relied on gesture sensors so teens could sit or lie down but still make modest physical movements. An HTC VIVE or Oculus Rift (OR) head-mounted display (HMD) was used to see the 3D visuals, and a Leap Motion sensor was used to detect user actions as teens attended to tasks. Offering first-person perspectives, Farmooo enabled direct physical interactions with farming tools, seeds, and soil in an open farm land. The gesture sensor successfully allowed gameplay while sitting or lying down but had to be modified to pick up the hospitalized patients’ colder-than-average hands. What patients did in the game was automatically <saved> so they could easily return to it after interruptions or bouts of feeling ill.

Results: Overall, the team gained insights on how to provide pain distraction via VR games for teenaged cancer patients, particularly understanding their needs at a critical time via “needs analysis” studies. All 12 teens in a Focus Group reported that the low-ploy design was “unexpectedly cool” (P4) as it “didn’t trigger nausea” (P2) and because what they grew could be differently interpreted by their parents vs. other teens (that is, parents saw carrots, teens saw ‘weed’). All were especially taken by the Companion Cow. 

By co-designing, prototyping and testing Farmooo with teens, we demonstrated the potentials of VR for “serious fun” for the newly built hospital’s Board. Because of privacy, security and parental concerns, we did not build Farmooo for multiple users in this iteration. However, all teens reported that loneliness was highest among their concerns. Best Poster, Canadian Pain Soceity, 2019.

Publication:

Janice Ng, Henry Lo, Xin Tong, Diane Gromala, Weina Jin (2018). “Farmooo, a virtual reality farm simulation game designed for cancer pediatric patients to distract their pain during chemotherapy treatment,” presented at the Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality Session at IS&T International Symposium on Electronic Imaging 2018 (EI 2018). 28 January 2018. Published in Electronic Imaging, The Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality 2018, pp.432.1–432.4. Burlingame, CA: Society for Imaging Science and Technology. https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2470‐1173.2018.03.ERVR‐432

We see it differently, depending on specific therapeutic contexts. In Farmooo, for instance, we used low-polygon images both because it would help ensure smooth interactions to support patients with nausea, and to enable them to ascribe their own meaning to images. We found that this design strategy worked: the teens in our study, for example, described the plants they grew very differently. Because the plants were necessarily abstract because they had few polygons, the teens could consider them whatever plants they wanted them to be. Moreover, the teens considered this affordance in very positive terms, calling it “crop diversity.