[1] VR Carnival - Stand and A Boat

(Early development of the VR Carnival Project)

The events I have volunteered at have amounted to me putting over a thousand user into Virtual Reality, and most of them experience VR for their first time.

As Virtual Reality goes, the market is though growing, still very small. There are still many people that have not had the opportunity to experience VR. When I used to volunteer at gaming festivals such as the Insomnia Gaming Festival, 4TG in Aberdeen and various others, it was just as encouraging to invite parents who had been queuing with their children to try the system as these systems are not just for the young, they are for everyone. Though the parents were hesitant at first, I have yet to have anyone who has had a negative first experience when inviting them to try the system.

As part of my Virtual Reality module in my final year of study, I have decided to create a Carnival in VR using the Unity game-engine and the Oculus Quest headset. Creating a Carnival offers the potential to create small games and amusements of varying requirements and intensities for all to enjoy. As of now, I have created two intractable experiences - a ‘Knock over the bottles’ stand and a remote-control boat.

I decided to start with the stand experience as Oculus offers a base level of interaction for using the Oculus Quest with Unity, offering controller and hand tracking libraries for developers to use, making interacting with grabbable objects much easier to be incorporated. Furthering this grabbing experience with physics allowed me to create a ‘Knock over the bottles’ game with a winning condition of knocking over all of the bottles, and losing when all of the balls have been thrown with bottles still standing.

The other, more recent experience I am working on is ‘Boat on a lake’, where a user can control a remote-control boat using buttons. This allowed me to further my experience in creating 3D buttons that the player can simply tap instead of the previous, less instinctive method of pointing at the button and pressing an input on the controller. The largest fulfilment I received creating this new method of input is that it is an adaptable button that I can pass in an object and use its methods, meaning I do not need a new script for every button. Seeing as this project may amount to over a hundred buttons, this measure will amount to a lot of time coding saved that I can put into making more experiences.

(Open Day Demonstration of both my VR Carnival and my Side-Project, UniPaths)

This project has already seen a good amount of use. As a Student Ambassador, I work on University Open Days and one of my suggestions (inspired from my volunteering experience) was to make the day more interactive, suggesting my own Virtual Reality projects to be showcased and playable by both prospectus students and other visitors in order to showcase the courses content. The feedback I receive on each Open Day helps me cater to what will be an optimal experience for a user seeking to play at a VR Carnival.

Going further, I shall seek to improve the stand via enhancing the visual look with better lighting, textures and detailed models, and the boat game via implementing a mini-game such as a timed checkpoint race to give purpose to the experience.