Adham Chakohi – Alternate Realities

VR Park

While fun, I didn’t find the park to challenge the VR technology or push its limits. One of my major disappointments in the park is the lack of an omni-directional treadmill. In my opinion the biggest limitation of VR is the lack of free movement. While the solution to that, an omni-directional treadmill, is not feasible for a home VR setup, it should be more than feasible for the world’s largest VR park.

One experience that I particularly enjoyed was Hologate. While there was nothing revolutionary about it, as it was a straight forward 4-player HTC Vive game, but the in game voice chat and being able to see the other players in game was a big factor helping immersion. It was one of the few games that integrated audio into the game play, which is a big contributing factor for me

Another experience that integrated audio was RobocomVR. The pod that turns 360 degrees along with some up and down movement was absolutely excellent for immersion, however the game play was extremely repetitive and did not invite you to use the full motion available to the pod. Additionally, the amount of explosions was too much at times, even for the computer running the game as it often stuttered.

In fact the lack of computing power was a recurring theme for many of the games in the park. Whether it was stuttering or incredibly low-resolution textures.

One thing I did like about the park is incorporating G-forces into games like in Burj drop and the roller coaster. It is infinitely easier to believe you are falling from the Burj if your body is also telling you that you are indeed falling.

All in all, the Park was technologically bland and truly lacks innovation, but it was still fun for a few hours.

Interaction

A few years ago, a kickstarter showed up for a game called Superhot. It had a mechanic which I’ve never seen before, which I really liked a thought it to be really interesting. The game is a shooter where you have to fight through different set stages, but time only moves when you do. So you can asses the situation without moving and then calculate your moves in order to not die and win the round, however if you look around then the bullets continue flying towards you. It started off as a normal computer game, however it came out around the time VR became popular and the game was perfect for VR, so it incorporated VR too.

Development Blog – Project 1

My project inspiration comes partially from a show called the man in the high castle, and partially from real life. The show is set in a world where the Axis powers won world war 2. There was a scene from the show set in Berlin, where a Nazi commander was addressing people in a massive auditorium building, and that scene really gave me a feeling of grandeur. I looked into that building, and it turns out that it is a building that the Nazis have really planned to build in the centre of Berlin once they won the war. It is called the Volkshalle.

Here are the depictions of the building in the show, and the plans for it from real life:

The structure was supposed to be massive, at around 400m tall and with a diameter of the dome alone at 290m x 290m, intending to seat 150,000 people. I intend to simulate the feeling of standing on the podium.

I started with creating a cube as the building. However I quickly realized that the surfaces on the cube face only outwards, so you cannot display texture on the inside. So I decided to go with 6 planes instead. The dome and the stands, however, proved very difficult to replicate. so instead, I decided to recreate the feeling of the volkshalle rather than a direct re-build. I thought about what made https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2akYIfxYbbE this scene so powerful. I determined that it was the scale of the building, the size of the crowd, the organized chants by the attendees, and the flags hung around.

I first created a simple but very large podium inside a massive hall. Then I added in some people using models from the asset store. However, a massive problem appeared. I needed a massive crowd, and the more people I added in, the more laggy the program got. It reached a point where even the macs in the classroom could not handle it, and would take 10 minutes to do even a simple operation. So I decided to use a rectangular prism instead of a model of a person to reduce the number of polygons Unity needs to render. This still caused some lag, however it was significantly less than with the people models, and I was able to create a larger crowd.

I then added in the flags. They are massive, with a logo on them. I did not want to use Nazi symbols, so I decided to go with the Abstergo logo instead, which is a very cult-like organization form the Assassin’s Creed games. The flags are just an image added onto a material, which is added onto planes.

I then added in audio. I decided to use the same chants used in the man in the high castle. I tried as much as I can to avoid Nazi symbols and phrases, however I could not find freely available audio that replicates the feeling I was going for more than that.

I wasn’t quite satisfied with the results, I needed to enhance the feeling of grandeur, so I added in statues. Next came what turned out to be one of the most unexpectedly time consuming tasks of this project, building the .apk and .app files. They took hours upon hours just to build. Nonetheless, here they are:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_7CXnfyNDD8YYHU6DY34HaKu92zkeUsy?usp=sharing

and a three-slide presentation about the project:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1WhcUUHWOIPkWwEs96qrND2xbYrVSrcErzguMZYEdjr0/edit?usp=sharing