Akash Menon

Avatar Creation and Embodied Presence in VR interviews

This master thesis project is about investigating whether creating an avatar can induce greater embodiment towards the avatar compared to the baseline of using default avatars.

I built an avatar creation system in which one can customize a personal avatar for use in different kinds of interview settings and public speaking tasks.

The system was integrated into an application for combating glossophobia (fear of public speaking) and for training different kinds of interviews.

Made in Unity for the Oculus Quest, Quest 2 primarily.

Conducted at Mimerse, a startup focusing on virtual reality apps for mental wellbeing.

Link to Thesis

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Christmas Hero

A christmas-themed point and click adventure game where the player is tasked with saving Christmas by solving Christmas riddles, defeating enemies and delivering presents. I worked with creating the game world, programming scene transitions, particle effects and sounds effects in Unity.

Game Webpage

Game Trailer

Git Repository

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Augmented Reality Munchkin

Title of report: "Using Augmented Reality & Sonification To Enhance Tabletop Games"

A group project as part of the KTH course DT2140 Multimodal Interaction and Interfaces. We developed a mobile app, featuring AR, which teaches you how to play the analog role-playing card game called Munchkin. I used Unity, Vuforia for AR and learnt the strengths and weaknesses of different modalities and how to best utilize them.

A key takeway was that using handheld devices such as smartphones can be distracting in social games. However, as a reference or lookup tool, augmented reality can efficiently be used to give contextual information of different aspects happening on the board when one needs it. We found that one could condense a lot more information and serve it in a contexual need to know manner through a smartphone app casting to a chromecast. This could be used to avoid overwhelming a novice to the game with a large manual of how the game is played and to instead learn as they go through this multimodal interface.

The information disparity that can be afforded by Augmented Reality can be used to design interesting gameplay mechanics and game roles in table top games which I hope to explore further.

Video Showing Features

Git Repository

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Perception of trees in a virtual urban environment

This was a group project study in the course "Human Perception" DM2350 at KTH. The virtual environment was accessed through a Occulus Rift, and originally built in Unity by Oscar Friberg (2016) and modified for our purposes in this study.

It was an excellent course which taught me how to critically analyze scientific papers in different domains of human perception, how to create good experimental design and how to efficiently communicate research. I also learnt a lot about the benefits and limitations of VR technology.

Abstract: "This study aims to investigate the potential impact of humans perception of greenery in virtual urban environments; does urban greenery affect the human emotion of depressiveness? Using immersive virtual environments is a method efficient of resources to make more informed urban planning decisions. Previous studies demonstrates an effect of greenery as having a positive net effect on the well-being of a city’s human population. The present study investigates by pair-wise comparisons the effect of greenery in a within-group manner. The participant’s task was to decide which scene (if any) of three different amounts of trees that was perceived as more depressing. Results indicate greenery to be negatively correlated to depression in the given virtual urban environment. "

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Forsberg Gam Jam 2020

An extremely silly couch-coop game made in a group in around 12 hours at Forsberg Game Jam where you are supposed to make sure the peasant comes home safely after a night at the bar. The players have no control over the peasant who stumbles around. Instead they control the environment and are supposed to make sure that the path is always hazard-free for the peasant to walk. The game was made in Unity and most of the assets were custom made in Maya by group members. We were only two programmers including me. I worked mainly on implementing the character, sound effects and some controls.

via GIPHY

via GIPHY

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Away From Home - Refugee Population Visualization Tool

An information visualization group project followed up by a group project study at KTH. The outcome was a visualization tool for exploring the UNHCR world refugee populations in the world. The follow-up study aimed to see whether the tool could be used to explore the data and uncover biases related to attitudes towards refugees.

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Barett Bear

A semi-autonomous, voice-controlled teddybear with robotic arms driven by a Raspberry Pi. It was built using pocketsphinx a offline TTS, customized version of Jasper with custom modules written in python and some bash scripts. A group project in which we adhered to agile methodology and where I acted as Scrum Master.

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Space To Sneeze

A hypercasual game similar to agar.io but in reverse. Result of a digital weekend game jam together with some others hosted by LiU Game Jam. The theme words of the game jam which where: Distance, Giant and 2020.

Play It Here

I had a lot of fun despite working completely remotely with everyone involved. Made in Unity.

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