Jack P. Oakley Portfolio Game Programmer/Designer

Thesis – Gestural Presentation Styles

For my Master’s Thesis I investigated how gesture presentation styles affect video games.  In particular, I ran two user studies looking into how gestural presentation style affects cognitive load/difficulty, and flow of a video game.  The coding of the two versions of the game I used is all done in Unity C#.  The first study was performed with 2-D gestures on a touchscreen zombie game, and the second study used 3-D gestures in the virtual reality version of the same zombie game.

My thesis is provided below for viewing and download, followed by a few gameplay videos of the games used in the thesis.

JackPOakley-Thesis

The following three videos show the game I designed for these studies.  The first video shows both interventions of the 2-D study, gestures presented as names and gestures presented as symbols.

These next two videos show the second study, gestures in 3-D space through a VR version of the game.  The first video shows the game using the symbols intervention, the second video shows the game using the names intervention.