The Ghost’s Spotlight: Sketch 360, The Secret of Puffin Cove

Welcome to this second episode of the Ghost’s Spotlight! As I have already said in the previous first episode, this is a new category of posts made to talk about some interesting projects that are worth a mention, but for which I don’t plan to write a full-fledged review. Maybe I have no time, maybe there are not many words to say, and so on.

I love using this kind of posts to give visibility to some VR stuff. I hope to help some indies in this way.

Sketch 360

Sketch 360 is not made by an indie, but by the mighty Microsoft. It is a product made by Microsoft Garage (something like a lab of ideas of Microsoft’s) that serves to sketch 360 videos.

This means that before you shoot a 360 video (or photo), you can take colored markers and sketch what you want to portray in the video all around you, in a 360 white dome. I think that it is a nice idea to prototype 360 movies, or tours, or whatever. You sketch stuff and when you are convinced by your mockups, you start shooting the product in real life. For sure this is an amazing possibility for creatives.

This is a short video of me using Sketch 360 (forgive the horrible things that I have drawn, I am not an artist 🙂 ):

As you can see from the video, the application is a 2D one: it shows you your 360 video as projected on a white rectangle on the screen, with all those curved lines that represent the projection lines and that you can use as a frame or reference, as a grid to draw correctly your elements in the video.

Using colored markers, pencils and so on, you can start drawing on your canvas what you would like to see in the video. Of course, you can draw lines with different colors and widths. Tools like a ruler and a protractor can help you in writing the lines exactly as you want them to be. It’s interesting to notice that the app works also on touch-enabled screens (e.g. Microsoft Surface): this means that artists can sketch 360 videos by hand!

You can also start a VR preview from within the app, but it is only compatible with WMR headsets. If you have not such kind of headsets, you can only preview on your display, moving the visuals with your mouse.

It’s very interesting that you can export your sketch as a 360 photo (that you can, later on, enjoy with some software that lets you see such kind of photos) or as a 360 webpage (that you can enjoy with every headset from a WebVR-compatible browser). This way you can see in VR the results of your sketches.

My opinion is that Sketch 360 is a very interesting tool to sketch 360 videos. People wanting to shoot a little short movie or prepare a virtual tour, may find really useful this app because it lets them prototype fast what they want to do. I found it very easy to learn and use, and this is for sure a good feature. Maybe it is not full of features, but IMHO it has the most important ones. The real shortcoming is that it is not fully integrated with VR and especially with all headsets. I think that Microsoft should add the possibility to do the sketches directly from inside VR… because drawing on a rectangular projection of a 360 dome is not optimal and sometimes it is also confusing. I’d also add the integrations with all headsets, as they have already done with Maquette.

Microsoft Sketch 360 is available for free from the Microsoft Store. You can get further info here.

The Secret of Puffin Cove

The Secret of Puffin Cove is a VR experience developed by Play2Speak that helps you in learning English.

The idea is to let the user play a game full of dialogues and in the meantime let him learn English. This is for sure an amusing way of learning English. I remember when I was a teenager, that I learned a lot of English terms by playing PC games.

The game is set in a piratical environment. The graphic is well made and being there with pirates drawn in a cartoonish way reminded a bit the epic adventures of Guybrush Threepwood.

As soon as you enter the game, you find the ghost of an old pirate that introduces you to the game and explains all the interactions methods. I found the idea of the ghost really smart: it really lets you feel inside the game, without breaking the magic in any way. There is not a “tutorial stage”: you start directly into the first room of the game, with the ghost letting you doing things to learn how to use the game. When the tutorial has finished, the ghost disappears and you begin the real action. That’s great.

The game is meant to be comfortably played in seated position. The reason is that there is not much action: the game is basically a series of different environments inside which you have dialogues. The dialogues are all in English, of course, since you have to learn English.

Your interlocutor speaks in English, and you can read what he is saying by watching the callouts coming out from his mouth. This way, if you are not that good in understanding spoken English, you can help yourself by reading the callouts. In the written text, some words are written in capital letters, because they are some important ones that you may want to remember.

The other pirate will ask you a lot of questions. And you will have to answer them using your own voice! This is a game that you mostly play with your voice. The software is integrated with IBM Watson, that listens to what you say and tries to interpret that, to verify that you have answered correctly to the questions.

At the end of each chapter (that is, each environment), you will see some statistics about your answers, like for instance how much you have answered correctly and how you have used a sophisticated language to answer. These are very important so that you can evaluate your progress and also have some hints about how to speak a better English.

As you can see, it is a very interesting project. But there are some issues. First of all, a game completely full of dialogues results static and a bit boring. I think that more action would be necessary. Then, IBM Watson is not always very good in understanding what you say… especially because it has of course been trained using English-people, while this software is meant to be used by non-English-people. So, many times it didn’t detect all my words correctly and this was frustrating. This is normal for voice-driven systems at the moment, as the art director of Ready At Dawn confirmed me in an interview.

The other final issue is one that I found also in other VR learning apps: they seem to me all “practicing” experiences more than “learning” experiences. I mean, if I don’t know how to speak English, I can’t use an experience that is all in spoken English. An experience made to learn, should teach me words, not just force me to use them. And if I am not answering correctly, it should explain to me why, and not only make me participate in a dialogue. It should provide automatic translations if I don’t understand. This, of course, would break the rhythm of the game, but would be true learning. What I want to say is: it is not easy to make an experience that makes you learn and it is funny at the same moment.

I found that The Secret of Puffin Cove is an interesting project because I really like language-learning experiences. It is not always easy to find someone to practice a language with, and so having a VR game to practice dialogues in a foreign language is really good. And as Vive Immersive Labs has highlighted, VR can really boost the language learning skills of every person. I enjoyed the piratesque environment, the possibility to use the voice to speak and the final statistics. But I think that Play2Speak should still work a lot in making the game more dynamic and also to make it more a complete learning experience, and not just a speaking playground. The game has just entered Early Access, so I think that the devs have still all the time to fix what is not working. Good luck to them 🙂

If you are interested, you can find it at $8.99 on Steam.

Happy VR to everyone!

(Header image by Play2Speak)