Tag: vr

Maximising VR immersion through acting

Imagine that you are in a VR adventure where you enter a room full of characters. They are all minding their own businesses: talking to each other, playing games and, in general, being alive. When you approach a group, or a single character, you start talking with them normally and they talk to you like if you were one of them. They are all following more or less a script for a story where you are the protagonist, and it is through interacting with all characters how you can progress in your very personal adventure. How could we create this?

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Virtual Reality for H&S training.

In March 2017 a was convinced by a friend to assist to the Hack_Construct hackaton in Manchester. What made this hackaton interesting was that it was aimed to the Health and Safety processes in the construction world. Teams were formed by a good mix of construction engineers, architecs and programmers; and the goal was to use technology to find new ways to improve their incredibly obsolete H&S procedures.

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VR Kite experiments

I am working on a new VR game for PC. The concept is quite simple: you fly a stunt-kite that has to perform a choreography following the music.

I started thinking about what would be a good VR-PC standing experience and kite flying is perfect: you are usually facing the same direction, taking maximum 1-2 steps forward/backward while controlling the lines. No need to teleport around or use the controllers awkwardly, you just swing your arms, walk a little and look around!

This is a post and not a proper page because I just wanted to highlight some of the features I am developing for the game. In this project I am taking care of the code and shading while a colleague  is doing the 3D, so most (all) of the pictures are a work in progress.

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Very Real Escape the Room

I always like to think about my house as a playground, that is why I try to do a pillow fort every now and then (I am getting incredibly good at it) with mazes, levers and riddles. But maybe I am finally getting old and for the last one I thought that moving mattresses, tables and hanging ropes everywhere was not a great idea because, when the puzzle is finished, I would have to dismantle it and I won’t be able to replay it ever again.

I recently went to my first “Escape the Room” game ever. In these games you are locked for 60 minutes in a room with some friends and have to solve some puzzles to get out. I really had a great time, it adds so much more things to the experience than the video-game versions! I was also well surprised with the difficulty: instead of 4 or 5 very hard riddles you have dozens of smaller ones, making it a more satisfying than frustrating experience… I needed to do one of those Escape the Room games for myself!

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VR Blink Detection

In December 2015 I was invited to Granada Gaming, a Video-games festival held in my home town, to talk about VR and my interaction experiments. Very exciting times!

I had to give two talks: the first one was oriented to all the professionals (coders, artists, journalists) where I explained some of the decisions I took while creating Apnea (my always in-progress  videogame). The second talk was for a general public and for this one I wanted to talk about something that seems to concern a lot of people: VR limitation and why FPS won’t work very well at the beginning.

I won’t cover the whole talk here as many of the interaction experiments showcased can be found already in the “VR Wireless” post and my github page, but I created something I thing is a cool hack to solve one of the main trends in VR movement: the blink transition.

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The virtual reality Gun controller

A lot of things have happened since the last update. Being the most important one that I achieve to get a job in the augmented reality industry! This has keep me very busy for the last year, but I have effectively managed to learn a lot in the field and also Android, iOS, Unity3D and many… many more. I love it!

Now that my “learning” curve has eased out I finally got time to carry on in my personal projects / hacks. And this time I promise I will put some proper code and tutorials (by the way I have enabled the comments so feel free to comment code in the older entries).

So this first new entry is related to the fact that I just received an Oculus Rift. This HMD is called to push the VR back in the trenches and I wanted to try it first hand… It promises real-time head tracking and perfect 3D vision of the environment with an epic field-of-view. You can move around the scenarios and after 3 minutes you truly believe you are inside. But head tracking is not everything in Virtual Reality and there is still some edges to cut: one of those is solving the problem of “moving around” with some kind of localization and I will talk about that one at some point; but the interesting one today is interacting with the environment, and when I say interacting I mean shooting at things… time for some Virtual Reality FPS.

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The home-made VR system

During my holidays I was growing quite fat due to inactivity and I was spending to much time playing Minecraft. Here at home I have got a dance mat for DDR and those rhythm games but I don’t really like them, so I decided to create something funny, healthy and a bit geek: a home-made virtual reality system!

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