Little VR Pet Shop: A Reverse Turing Multiplayer Virtual Reality Game

Little VR Pet Shop is a two-player virtual reality game designed to explore control schemes and metaphors for games driven by head movement rather than traditional gamepads or keyboards. Players wear low-cost Google Cardboard headsets, which use smartphones for head tracking and stereoscopic display. One player takes the role of a human shopper trying to identify the real human among seven AI-controlled animals, while the other controls a disguised animal, either a dog or a fish, attempting to blend in and avoid selection within a five-minute time limit.

The core contribution lies in three head-based control schemes. The human player walks by gazing at ground markers and pressing the headset trigger. The dog scheme has players tilt their heads toward the ground and look in their direction of travel, metaphorically representing sniffing, reinforced by sound design. The fish scheme uses slow sideways head shaking to swim toward the gaze direction. These designs draw on prior research into head-directed navigation in virtual environments.

The game was evaluated across two user-testing iterations involving 68 participants, combining questionnaires with semi-structured discussions. The human control scheme was rated the most comfortable and accurate, while fish players often reported feeling insufficiently in control of their movement. The fish scheme, however, was rated the most entertaining. Overall reception was strong, with 94.1% of participants in the second iteration saying they would play again. Participants who did not identify as gamers adapted to the controls faster than experienced players, who tended to expect familiar input methods.

The findings suggest two broader implications: that developers can produce engaging VR experiences with minimal hardware, and that head-based controls can attract audiences who might not otherwise consider themselves digital game players.