The Virtual Frontier

The Showroom Exploration

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I recently made a few environmental concepts for a type of classroom I’ve been calling The ShowroomTM, and I figured it’d be good to take some time to further dive into exactly what’s going on with this conception and the types of interactions that would be possible in these different iterations. (All measurements are in Unity’s default units, which are reported to be meters)

The Small Stage

Current Object Size: 5x5x5

Current Stage Size(radius): 10

Uses for this stage?

  • Smaller classroom experiences
  • Smaller objects ( real size cars, or enlarged objects)
  • Simple goals/objectives

The Medium Stage

Current Object Size: 40x12x15

Current Stage Size(radius): 40

Uses for this stage?

  • A larger class size
  • Bigger objects (Dinosaurs, Ships, etc)

The Large Stage

Current Object Size: 384x192x18

Current Stage Size(radius): 212

Uses for this stage?

  • A huge class size
  • Buildings (like the St. Louis Arch, which the example is based on)

There may even be options for expanding this vertically instead of just horizontally. For example we could have like a whole rainforest and have it broken down by the different layers, with different activities in each layer. So like this:

And each layer is represented in the scene as a different level to be explored. And the professor could control the accessible layers and move the class as a whole or grant movement between layers to students individually so they could be on different layers if they wanted to do some interaction or activity on a specific layer to better reinforce what they’ve learned.

Unity to Unreal Development Part 1: Prep work

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If you have any interest in Game Development than there is no doubt you’ve heard of Unity and Unreal as the two titans of independent development. I myself have been using Unity professionally for over a year now, and have been using it for amateur development for nearly 4 years before that, but nothing exists in a vacuum, and with the eventual release of Unreal Engine 5 and Unity’s dichotomy of updates (really, it’s kinda staggering how their most recent stable release is currently two “years” behind the most recent beta release) I’m very interested in exploring new opportunities for development. Before I do any sort of move, or even open Unreal, I need to know what I’m getting myself into first, and that’s where I turn to tutorials.

Luckily, both Unity and Unreal have excellent tutorial sites, and wouldn’t ya know? Unreal has a whole tutorial series on moving over from Unity! They even got Craig Barr to do it, which means you’ll be hearing a familiar voice if you’ve spent any time watching Unity tutorials. That tutorial can be found here

After watching the course I kinda feel better about making the switch. I only say kinda because I figured that structurally Unity and Unreal are similar enough that I could eventually find my way around the editor, and I know that the struggle is gonna come once I start developing and need to start writing C++. At least, I though that would be a problem, until I found a neat little github repo called MonoUE which allows you to write code for Unreal using C#(yay!) or F#(cool? Does anyone know what this is?).  Another small gripe I have is every time you open a new window in Unreal it doesn’t attach itself like a tab in Unity, which is really a small thing, but something I noticed that’s probably going to frustrate me early on. On the other end of the spectrum, I think it’s really cool how UE occasionally releases assets from its games as free assets to be downloaded and used in your projects. That sort of thing can really help you either make your own game look better faster, or allow you to deconstruct what you like about the assets so you can replicate a more customizable version of it for your game!

So my next step is to actually get into a project in Unreal Engine and see what happens. Unfortunately I’ve run into a couple of issues with installing MonoUE (that’s on my end, not MonoUE) and to get it in my version of UE I needed to get UE through Github, which is fine, but it means I need to finish setting up UE through Github, and installing everything UE needs to work when accessed through that route. But once I do all that, I’ll get in and report exactly what it’s like to work in a UE editor as someone with Unity experience!

Rec Room Developer Analysis

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Putting the Rec in Recreational

So, after about a month of exploration into Rec Room’s systems (playing the game, scouring the wikis, building my own rooms, etc.) I’ve think it’s time for me to finally write up what I’ve been thinking. My tl;dr is this: This platform is great for pre-generated content, but actual development/creation is pretty wonky, even if you’re comfortable with node based coding. Basic interactions/emulation is pretty simple to set up, but everything more complex than that, from animations to environments to sfx to just the act of coding itself is better left to more professional systems. I know, not entirely surprising, but Rec Room has a great looking UI and UX experience up front, so I was looking forward to that experience transferring over more to the actual development experience. But I don’t want this to come off as entirely negative, so let’s go into the pros of using Rec Room.

As you can tell by my tie and 80s Athletic shirt, I’m quite the fashion icon.

Pros:

  • Very nice UI/UX experience. Just clicking on the buttons themselves was a satisfying and inviting experience.
  • A huge amount of research materials (like the how to create series and their creative programs page, not to mention all the other user generated youtube tutorials and the wiki).
  • Creating your own rooms is a simple step and gets you into creation very quickly.
  • You can also very easily set up your room to have multiple contributors, so if you and your friends want to create something together, that’s totally possible.
  • There are a lot of good free assets (called “inventions” in game) that can really boost your creations aesthetically .
It’s quite easy to get a group of people together in Rec Room!

Cons:

  • Creating takes place within the world, as opposed to providing a separate interface. So you are either creating in VR (not comfortable) or you are emulating the actions of your character on desktop (not optimal).
  • The Circuits System is useful, but it doesn’t allow for enough customization to create unique experiences (ie no control to the physics simulation for specific objects).
  • The Edit features available for each object also suffer from this lack of granularity, and having to edit using the maker pen does not help.
  • Paradoxically, making large changes to a room can be a great hassle, as there’s no simple “select all” or “select group” functionality.
The configure option quickly becomes your best friend in the maker pen, as it shows you what Rec Room will let you change within the object itself, which is usually not much.

Best Use Case Scenarios:

So, why use Rec Room? Well:

  1. If you’re a young developer who doesn’t have access to more professional tools for whatever reason (ie Unity, Blender, etc) then Rec Room can be a very fun and inviting experience. It could very easily spark a further passion for greater development goals. Or,
  2. If you’re a seasoned developer, but have an idea that could use a Minimum Viable Product, then Rec Room can help you easily stress test that idea with multiplayer functionality.

And that about wraps it up. Rec Room kinda does what VRChat doesn’t when it comes to development, but also doesn’t do anything VRChat does. It’s funny, if a system could take the UX and design of Rec Room, but give it the functionality of VRChat/Unity, then that’d be perfect from a VR Development point of view. Hopefully if VR becomes a more accessible form of entertainment there will be the incentive to create such a program, but for now I’ll be sticking with Unity.

Basic Experience Comparison Project Update 12/22

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Well, here we are at the end of the year. I’m especially excited to show off the progress made in this post, since a lot of it will focus on the visual themes and assets being used in the project! While talking about code is fun and all, it’s nice to have clean and distinct visuals in my updates, so without further ado, let’s begin!

The Environment

So, after deciding upon the location of where these experiences will take place, I managed to obtain assets from the Unity Asset Store and have been using them as the basis for the scenes. I will also post links to their store page so you can pick them up if you like what you see!

The Playroom

With this project, I had originally thought I could stick everything in one environment and be done, but no single environment really fit everything I needed, so I opted for two and have further broken down the experiences into two location based categories: indoor and outdoor. The indoor experiences will be handled in the playroom:

Link to playroom asset

In order to get a feeling of you being a kid in the space I also sized up everything considerably (everything’s 40% bigger than normal) and honestly that alone really sells the narrative that you are just a kid playing around in this space, and while this makes some objects seem outrageously big when viewed from afar (like the kid table and the chairs lol), when you view it in first person, the fact that everything is huge kinda mellows out the weirdness of specific objects.

The Playground

In addition to Playroom, I’ve also found and added a Playground for any larger experiences like the fly through. I may scale up the environment like I did the Playroom to give a better feel of the scale of the environment.

Playground
As you can see, the playground is connected to the playroom!

Link to Playground Assets

Conclusion

Now that I have a majority of my assets in the scene I’ll be busy recreating my experiences into this new environment, and once I complete this I’ll just need to do the same for the Desktop and then things will going smoothly!

Basic Experience Comparison Project Post: What Space do I Use?

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The Intro

Hey y’all. I’ve been thinking about space again. This time I wanna focus on space as an extension of the play experience, rather than the current mechanical limitations placed on the play experience by our available space. More specifically I’ve been talking with my boss about creating an environment in which we can give people basic mechanical interactions/experiences within a well defined and easily understood space so we can have people test the mechanical viability of an interaction in a VR application vs. a desktop application. Part of this post is going to be a pros and cons discussion of the different environments we’ve been exploring, but another part I want to focus on is the idea of “functional space” and how it relates back to VR mainly.
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Pros and Cons of Developing for VRChat

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Hey everyone! I thought I’d create a little write up of the pros and cons of developing for VRChat, since there are some idiosyncrasies that can turn off some developers, and I’d rather we go in knowing what to expect then be blindsided by certain weird things. I’ll start with the Pros though, since there are quite a few, and they’re pretty big.
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VRChat Upload Guide

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Hey Everyone! Here’s a quick step by step tutorial on how to upload a world to VRChat. Since we’ve been exploring the viability of VRChat for our design purposes I will also be writing a sort of review/critique of VRChat through the lens of our department’s needs, so it’ll be kinda like a pros and cons list, and will include a few examples, but for now, if you’re curious on how to get it all up and running, then keep reading!
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