An exploration of wonders and challanges of VR development.
The first requirement was to decide on a concept for our VR experience which would be both be original and relatively simple to implement in a short time span.
There were two main concepts that were considered. The first was a VR animation environment where players would be placed within a film allowing them basic interaction within the story playing out in front of them. In essence it would be a VR version of the Telltale games except with slightly more interactivity on the part of the player. This would utilise the full immersive potential of VR whilst giving creators a platform to create and share there VR creations.
However, this presents a number of technical challenges. Firstly this would involve a substantual number of systems which would be needed to handle components such as asset loading and animation timing. This would take a significant amount of time, more than the scope of this project allows. This would be in addition to learning how to produce a VR game. Accounting for this we the team decided not to proceed with this concept.
The second concept we had was inspired by the idea of navigating a War-Room. As is standard in many RTS games, players are able to navigate an environment via moving a camera around a terrain where they are then able to control the units in the said environment. Our concept is to allow for this in a 3D VR space with the battle taking place on a table or similar surface, however instead of restricting the player to just a view of the table they are then able to scale the environment and ‘enter the battle’ as well as move the environment around them. In terms of complexity whilst it comes with its own set of challanges this project is more focused than the previous concept as it requires only a few key mechanics in order to implement properly.
After considering both ideas we decided on the latter concept and began experimentation with this goal in mind.
As our concept utilises room scale we required a VR system that would allow players to easily navigate a room of (n * n) dimensions.
As of time of writing there are only two mainstream headsets that are capable of room scale, these being the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. We found that the Oculus Rift approach is simpler to setup and start using, whereas the HTC Vive had a vastly more complex setup process which could be problematic if two setups were present in the room, as the sensors could interfere with each-other. But this is an unlikely scenario and in terms of the play area the HTC Vive allows for larger spaces and fairly precise tracking than compared with the Rift. The Rift also has better compatibility with development toolkits and widely used platforms such as OpenVR and SteamVR which makes development on the device simpler as well as guaranteeing that the game will work with any headset that is SteamVR compatible.