team building in VR

follow our CS210 virtual reality dev adventures in multi-user team building apps

[teamvrtex]

Tractor beam functionality finished and ready to deploy on our shuttle. Don't worry Sandra Bullock, we're coming for you!

[teamvrtex]

Dr. Mann (played by Matt Damon) spotted near our ISS.  Keep on your guard...

[teamvrtex]

Space Launch!  Last week we had our product launch, which given our galactic theme, we decided to decorate accordingly.  Overall, it went super well!  We received great feedback from users and learned about how to fill the gaps in our experience.  Currently our three major takeaways from launch are to:

1)  Improve navigation experience of the Drobot (NO GIMBLE LOCK)

2)  Balance the roles more evenly since VR user is having most fun

3)  Give users an objective, backstory, and ticking clock to the experience

Lastly, Kyle’s badges were a hit!  Especially with the younger crowd, as indicated by Otto’s Space Face.  

[teamvrtex]

check out these beauties! Kyle designed a logo for GRAVITEAM and spent much of the day laser cutting badges out of basswood to hand out as prizes for launch week! want to get your hands on one? come to our project unveil Thursday 5/7 at 4pm in Gates 505.

[teamvrtex]

our “breakathon” last week indicated that calculating the distance between hands and sychronizing that with speed is not an intuitive interaction mechanism... this week we’ve adopted a “thrust” motion using just one hand and the leap motion. way smoother. way more fun. and now we can go in reverse!

[teamvrtex]

My colleague Andrea getting comfortable in her astronaut avatar in Earthlight, Opaque Media’s new space-themed Kinect game!

[teamvrtex]

Today I attended Microsoft’s Build Conference 2015 in San Francisco.  Among many surprises, the best was running into Opaque Media, the game studio behind the Kinect 4 Unreal plugin our team has been using for GraviTeam!  They were demoing their new game Earthlight, where you use the Kinect to navigate an astronaut avatar outside the ISS.  The graphics were incredible, their rendered ISS far exceeds what we have currently going in GraviTeam but Opaque was open to sharing some of their assets with us.  They also demonstrated a great interest in the work we are doing and were ecstatic to run into other developers using their plugin.  Looking forward to talking with the team at Opaque more! 

We also ran into Derrick, our 210 TA and resident Microsoft aficionado.  He tried the HoloLens and had some great comments on his experience.      

[teamvrtex]

Breakathon day, featuring our first full software test! Notice Commander Seth using professional terms like: Full Gimbal Lock and STEADY. Major thanks to Team Dixie Chix for helping us test to space and back! Lots of great feedback to incorporate into our next builds.

[teamvrtex]

sending accelerometer data from the iphone over OSC to UE4 running on the desktop... controls yaw, pitch and roll of the space drone. flying is coming together!

[teamvrtex]

taking this Kinect manipulation one step further, we’ve connected shields to our space drone that deflect damaging space debris!

[teamvrtex]

playing around with Kinect controls -- here we have left and right arm movements trigger collisions with dynamically generated objects

[teamvrtex]

Is it the first week of Spring Quarter?  We couldn’t tell here in Ischia, Italy.  

Sadly our adventure is coming to a close.  Over the past four days, we’ve managed to eat Michelin-starred pizza, drink arugula liquor, witness the aftermath of an island corruption scandal, and team up with a few awesome marine biologists to capture a rare coral reef for spherical virtual reality.  PLUS, we even were interviewed by local media (in Italian) and made the homepage of Ischia’s #1 news blog:

http://quischia.it/2015/04/dalla-california-a-ischia-quel-fondale-marino-sotto-al-castello-trasformato-in-realta-virtuale/

Alas, school calls and Alec and I both should reunite with the rest of Team VRTEX back at home.  Still, it’s tempting to stay here and run for mayor.  CIao Italy!  But Europe is not over yet, we still have one more night in Barcelona...

[teamvrtex]

Saying goodbye to Carlo, the trusty German steed with an uncanny resemblance to the late Carl Marx and in whose warm embrace we traveled across Europe in both style and comfort

[teamvrtex]

Marseille ❤️🌀

[teamvrtex]

"I think they ran out of money to build the other half" -Alex Z.

[teamvrtex]

And €30 in tolls later...

[teamvrtex]

IEEEVR 2015 was a great success! Our favorite talks were about next-gen interface designs for VR, use of serious games with VR in aviation safety training, and a new mobile device technology called Object Impersonation. We also tried a suite of creative demos, such as a Greek art project, Haption (haptic robotics) and NeverBlindVR. We learned a ton, and were supper happy we made the trip to Arles, France! Next stop: Marseilles.