Follow Togo as he goes on a journery to deliver the serum to save the children of Nome, a village in Alaska from epidemic. Created with the Drama department of CMU for Oculus Rift
Platform: Oculus Rift
Team Size: 15
Role: Programmer/Visual Effects
Development Period: 2 Weeks
Link
Introduction
A full-fledged theme park VR experience complete with an automated ride on Oculus Rift following the journey of the Dog, Togo, who saved the village of Nome.
My Contributions
I was a programmer in this project. I also helped with some visual effects.
Created and integrated water splash using Maya Bifrost
Simulated ice-floor cracking and shattering using Pull Down It plugin.
Optimized Unity scenes involving massive terrains, shaders and particle effects.
Implemented player ride journey and environment.
Design Challenges
The journey was set in the arctic lands of Alaska. This meant huge vast terrains that impeded with performance and required to be optimized through occlusion culling.
The environment required to be dark and foggy due to the nature of the artics. Allowing just the right visibility
for a ride moving continuously was a challenge.
The ride involves a bear chase. Having the bear appear such that the rider takes note of it was a challenge in VR since naive VR users do not understand the 360 degree nature of it.
Importing bifrost animations into Unity wasn't supported natively. Maya exports and alembic which needs to be imported via a plugin.