This virtual museum was created as my final project for Udacity VR Design. I was asked to research an industry that’s being impacted by VR and present my findings in a virtual setting. I chose to take a look at the entertainment industry, specifically film-making and video game development.
Introduction
Instead of a typical museum environment, I decided to put the user in a virtual home theater where they can interact with 11 different objects to learn about VR entertainment in the form of texts, images and videos.
All media files are taken from Pinterest and YouTube. Unless stated otherwise, all prefabs are from the Unity asset store.
Video Walkthrough
Process Breakdown
Structure
Simple 3D cubes were used to create the walls, ceiling and skylight. I came up with the idea of illuminating the scene only with ambient light after discovering through trial and error that it produces the most smooth and natural-looking environment.
Start Panel
Posters
VR Games
Cubes were used to create the cases. The head set model was downloaded free of charge from www.cgtrader.com.
Magazines
Magazines were created by overlaying new material on the original cover taken from benjaminszabo.wordpress.com.
Animated Wallpaper
A theme that came up repeatedly while researching for this project is that many tried-and-true narrative conventions simply do not apply in VR, so new techniques will have to be invented to create truly compelling VR experiences. The animated wallpaper was added in that spirit.
The prefab for the director’s chair was downloaded free of charge from www.turbosquid.com. The video was modified from a YouTube trailer of the PS4 game Flower.
User Testing
Two users participated in play-testing. Feedback was very positive except for a few suggestions:
- Both users felt the waypoints looked much farther than they really were. After some trial and error I realized it was basically a scaling issue, and with proper rescaling the illusion went away.
- Both users complained that some of the event triggers did not work. After hours of re-scripting I discovered that all I needed to do was make the box colliders bigger.
- One user commented on the jagged shadows. Interestingly, the issue was resolved when I decreased the shadow distance.
Conclusion
Researching and building this project was a joy. The freedom to create whatever I wanted was challenging because I had to make all the creative decisions myself, write scripts from scratch, and learn how to use new tools such as the Unity video player, but it ultimately led to a wonderful learning experience. I do have some reservations about the animated wallpaper because of the low resolution and the few frames of black screen before playback, which is in fact a rather complicated problem to fix. Given more time I would’ve also tried to implement a system of moving without using waypoints, but overall I’m very happy about how the project turned out.