Sharing a play through of the game with the audience, Klaire and Jac then went through all the features in a live demo. Casting to a large screen grabbed everyone’s attention and meant that we had constant queues of people eager to try it out at our stand in the technology village.
We had a limit of 5 minutes per player, which led to some people coming back 5+ times to give other sections of the game a go. Later in the week we doubled our capacity with more headsets, and ended up taking up the entire hut. Aberwla has been designed to allow up to 30 people at a time to share the experience so adding another 3 was not a problem.
People of all ages enjoyed the experience with lots of interest from teachers and councillors requesting the game be made available in their area. The game was originally developed for ages 6 – 14 based on the recommended age from Oculus being 6+, however, we found younger children picking up the controllers and using the game with ease. It was wonderful to see plenty of adults enjoying the game too!
The Eisteddfod was a great place for us to stress test the software with our developer Mike on hand to implement live bug fixes. He was able to push updates and to monitor the VR world from Pwllheli to improve the user journey.
We found that while six vr headsets were in constant use, mostly running on 4g, Aberwla uses very little data, using less than 1gb of data per day when we were there. The game is also playable offline, so even if the internet connection dropped, the game could still be enjoyed; just without other people being in the same shared game space.
We had a fantastic time, and the launch was a roaring success. We can’t wait to see more people using Aberwla!
A big thank you to everyone who has worked hard with the M-SParc arrangement, animated technologies and Haia!
Big shout out to Tanya who did a fantastic job of organising and running the Science and Technology Village in its first year! You rock!