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clyde

Virtual Reality Development

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I sorta fell into VR development accidentally, so I spent the morning digging into some videos I figured I'd share. I found this site that has a listing of UI/UX resources that was interesting and watched a couple things: http://www.uxofvr.com/

 

This'n is a kinda high level discussion of possible interaction designs, mostly based around a combination of an HMD and hand/finger tracking with a Leap Motion that was...interesting, and presented some cool ideas, but felt a little aspirational(?) given the current state of hardware and VR operating systems. The presentation is really slick though and gives you a good sense of the possibilities for the ideas he discusses. I guess this guy now works at Google on VR stuff.


 

This was more grounded, and kinda specifically tackles Gear VR development (it's from a dev at Samsung) and the limitations of that hardware. Probably more relevant for cardboard/gear/daydream than room scale/positional stuff, but it covers a bunch of very specific, super useful info like what viewing angles are comfortable for people wearing an HMD and how to build UI around that.

 

 

That presenter also recommended a Valve talk, 'Lessons Learned from porting TF2 to VR' which I haven't checked out yet, but probably will tomorrow.

 

Something I'm wondering about is how much the thinking about this UI design has changed since these videos came out (late 2015 and 2014 respectively). They aren't even that old, but since they were made all the hardware has actually come out so I imagine the best practices have become a little more clear since then. I'll probably try and dig into VRDC talks from this year next to get more up to date presentations, and it looks like all the Oculus Connect talks are publicly available as well: 

 

So...yeah, anyone else doing VR stuff and have videos or anything they like? I'm trying to ramp up on this stuff as fast as I can, so I'd love to hear what people have found useful.

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I'm kinda interested in making something for VR in Unity. I haven't actually tried to do it yet though.

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My intro was spending an afternoon goofing around with the Unity VR demo stuff and sort of remixing them into other games, that's a fun/super easy way to jump into making some stuff.

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I imported a bunch of oculus packages or whatever a few months back when I was trying to make something for the Gear. I have no idea what I did in that time, but now all I have to do is install the Oculus utilities package, open a scene and start making a diorama. It surprises me every time I press play and my headset automatically works. The resolution settings in the build seem to only affect the desktop mirroring; that keeps it simple. It's kinda neat that I can just make and distribute a VR thing now. I'll probably wait until 5.4 is released before trying to figure out how to export for the Vive. I doubt I'll make anything I want to show before then anyway.

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I'm surprised how far I can get with some of my older projects by just making the camera static and clicking on the Virtual Reality Supported box.

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I made some stuff! Probably the biggest challenge I've been having is that the scene view in Unity doesn't at all accurately represent the scene when you pause, which makes debugging and positioning things really annoying. The physics on throwing/arm velocity is also a little strange...I found a couple decent solutions on this Stack Overflow answer, but I feel like I'm still not all the way there.

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I did a bunch more work on the bird flying arm flapping thing and made it more of a game. Thinking about it now though, I think it'd be way more satisfying to just build as a flight simulator. No explicit goals, just fly, and soak in the feeling of flying. I had been kinda envisioning a very small scale arm-powered Flappy Bird, but after playing it more and getting the feeling better I think anything that gets in between you and the feeling of flight is bad.

 

This was something I kinda felt after playing Space Pirate Trainer...it feels amazing to go wild, cross your arms, dual wield sweet space guns, and it only hurts the experience to have to constantly stop and restart the game. Maybe my feelings on this will change when flying in VR has been around for longer, but for now, it still feels...I wanna say novel, but that kinda brings it down. I've dreamed of flying (like literally, dreams at night) my entire life and now I can do it...why bother trying to get a high score or complete a level, when I just wanna fuckin' SOAR.

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The bird-simulator is the most glorious thing I have seen. Market it to bird watchers. You could model different bird behaviors, and they could each require a different technique and mastery.  thrushes, crows, gulls, hawks. Maybe anything smaller than a crow, pigeon, or thrush might require too much flapping. Small birds like sparrows, bushtits, and humming birds would require excessive flapping for realism; unless the game converts 2 human flaps into 20 sparrow flaps. Large predator birds, or pelagic sea birds, would be potentially the most joyful to play as, as you could get close to a realistic human to bird flapping ratio, and experience the gentle constant flapping of a gull or tern; or the soaring and diving of a predator like a hawk or osprey. Or a desert (or suburban) vulture. Yes, I have passed time as a bird-watcher, and have thought about what the bird-watcher's game would be like.

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