The VR Well project is a virtual reality experience designed to educate users about in-ground wells. The experience allows users to ride an elevator down into the ground to points of interest along the length of an in-ground well. Each waypoint is accompanied by educational audio narration which informs the user about the well part, well component, or ground layer exhibited at the corresponding location. Elevator stops include points of interest such as the well cap, pitless adapter, subsoil layer, water table, and well pump.
In this second MCU Dev blog post I cover the advanced features I developed after the basic functionality of the package was finished.
The Motor Control Units Development (MCU Dev) package was created to familiarize myself with the Motor Control Unit functionality for the physics based interaction system called Forcibles which the VR framework PuppetJump uses for object interactions. This package was also created to explore some of the capabilities which could become possible by using the Motor Control Units functionality.
While developing Unity projects I have found it very helpful to capture gameplay videos at various points of development. These videos are very useful for documenting the progress and progression of each project and make great content for demo videos, blog posts, and professional portfolios. Most of these videos have been 2D screen captures, which work well in most scenarios, but fail to capture some of the immersive aspects of virtual reality (VR) applications. Two dimensional videos are also very underwhelming and often boring when being viewed from within a VR headset. So the solution for this was to learn how to capture 360 degree videos.
In this post I will cover the steps taken to capture and play 360 video in Unity for the S&DVR project using the Rock VR – VR Capture Unity package.
Virtual Reality (VR) development is an innovative and exciting field to work in. Once a project gets rolling it can be so much fun to invent, program, and problem solve to create the solutions and experiences required for each project. Getting to that point always involves passing through a process that is often vastly more complicated than it needs to be, the process of setting up the initial VR framework for a new project. Since the field of VR is so rapidly changing and evolving, each time a new project is started there is usually some aspect of setup that runs into issues and disconnects between updates in various editors, packages, or plugins. Luckily for my teammates and I, our manager Zac has put together a fantastic framework called PuppetJump that streamlines most of this project setup.
In order to familiarize myself with the functionality built into PuppetJump, I decided to start building small demo projects that center on implementing specific aspects of the framework. In this post I will cover the development process for a small demo I have been referring to as the Magnetics Lab.
Welcome to Bart Masters Development Log Page. On this site I will be posting about the steps I take while developing for the projects I am working on as part of the PSU Center For Immersive Experiences.
