Week 1: The Breathing Game Blog

Hi there!

This is the start of our team blog. This space is for you to be part of our team’s journey on the game development process during the Spring 2020 Augmented, Virtual & Mixed Reality course at USC (CSCI 538). Our team has an amazing opportunity to work on building games to make the breathing therapy process more interactive and fun for kids at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

Our eight person team contains a mix of experience in various fields of engineering. During our first team meeting we did a typical icebreaker ceremony. We analyzed the game development space for our team. We are tasked to use the Oculus Quest, and a customer spirometer which provides the game with breathing data for inhaling and exhaling. With this detail, we took time to ideate games that would possibly work well in VR space with the idea of a child needing to be stationary while performing breathing exercise with a spirometer.

Fortunately, a prior team had worked on this project so we have the option to not start completely from scratch. The game idea list included basketball, racing, archery, something related to balloons, blowing and picking up pebbles with a straw, and a Save the Villager game which you put out fires in a village being attacked by cute dragons. A main challenge is designing the games in a why that focuses on encouraging the child to breath in and out and hold for a specified number of seconds in order to properly satisfy the breathing therapy. In the next 3 months we look forward to sharing with you our path to designing novel solutions to this design problem.

Cheers! – The CHLA Team