VRET Stuttering — Week 3 Progress
This week I attempted to scale down my project and expand/make more progress on my idea from Fall Semester. I wanted to gear it more towards helping people who stutter. Based on the survey I created a couple weeks ago, I learned that the most feared situations for people who stutter are public speaking, introducing themselves, and job interviews. I will be attempting to re-create these environments in VR.
The main step I wanted to take this weekend was to build some kind of “menu” system for my “game”. I spent a long time exhausting different options. I started exploring a “pointer” that could trigger buttons on Unity’s UI feature. I spent a lot of time on these tutorials:
They ending being very long, with quite a few different moving parts. I was scared to even start these because I knew if there was one error I ran into, it would be very frustrating to have made progress only to have one small thing screw me up. But it was appealing to me because this was one of the few tutorials I could find that were specific to Steam VR and the HTC Vive.
And this is what ended up happening. I spent hours on these tutorials, got a pointer to work, but for some reason, it wasn’t interacting with the buttons. And I hadn’t even gotten to the point of assigning scenes to the buttons. Although I thought I wasted many hours trying to figure this out, I was learning about Steam VR and Unity packages in the process. I was getting back into the groove of using Unity again. Staying organized with your files and folders is an incredibly essential part of using the program when working with a lot of scenes, prefabs, and scripts. So I guess the positive of going through all those tutorials was that I was able to organize my project folder.
But, with all trails, there is a light at the end of the tunnel! And I was lucky to reach that light eventually. After feeling defeated after almost two days of trying different tutorials, I stumbled upon this one:
All it takes is constant Googling with some small changes in language. This wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but I was desperate to get something to work. A tutorial that achieves the basic goal that I wanted that is only four and a half minutes? It’s a dream come true.
It took a lot longer than that to get it to work because the tutorial required VRTK to operate. I had seen this before but was unsure of what is was/how it worked. With my new knowledge of VR packages and SDK’s, I felt more confident in exploring this. I downloaded and installed VRTK, and had to download and install an earlier version of SteamVR, which I found here.
I was stunned when I got this work. I deleted my old SteamVR package and install this new one. It worked, and my project file got even more organized. So I continue on with my tutorial. It had me install some of the VRTK functionalities, mainly teleportation. I wasn’t super crazy about using teleportation because I’m not a huge fan of it in general. I think it’s a little strange for the user upon first use and I think my game doesn’t really need it. But again, I was desperate so I went with it. I think I’ll just need to have some kind of instruction on how to use it initially.
Anyways, I installed the teleportation and then sit up “trigger boxes” that the user could teleport to and enter, and those boxes would send them to different scenes. It was as simple as that. I actually almost prefer this way more than my original idea because I think it’s a little more immersive, engaging, and has more room for creative since I can shape the environment around how I will. Right now I have the trigger boxes set up as doors. But they can be anything I want!
I now have a menu system! Here’s a janky video of it working using a VR simulator. The “cabin” scene is just a folder that I pulled for free from the Unity Asset store to test. It will be replaced with something relevant to my project. But I got it to go back too!
That’s about all the progress I’ve made this weekend. Now looking forward to making the menu scene look cool, and building out other environment.
One issue though… I had to reinstall SteamVR and the VRTK on my public speaking scene and it seemed to screw up some of the scripts, naming the random topic generator and the timer. Its OK though, those were things I wanted to change a bit anyway. I think this new menu system is more important anyway, so it was worth the sacrifice.
Anyway, onwards and upwards! A lot to work on this week now that I’ve got the (hopefully) hard part done.
