At the start of the project I was under the impression that we would receive an SDK development kit with whatever hardware we would use and that most of the functionality would have to be programmed ourselves. However, luckily, it appears that an individual has taken it upon himself to develop a generic toolkit that integrates all the available virtual reality hardware into Unity, the VRTK (Virtual Reality Toolkit). This makes developing for virtual reality a means of adding components to objects instead of attaching wholesome, self-written scripts.
For our project we chose to make use of the HTC Vive. After following some of the avaible tutorials on using VRTK, from the author himself (link to YouTube channel) I quickly had set up a scene with a few interactable objects that could be tested in virtual reality. To familiarize myself with the available functions and how most of the underlying scripts work I set out to make a simple interaction with a few coloured balls and colourless cubes. When the player picks up a ball and touches a white cube, the cube takes over the colour of the ball. Simple enough and quickly made! I wouldn't be myself if I didn't set out for a bit more of a challenge however and started delving in the scripts behind VRTK and see if I can make extensions to this. Taking a look at different projects and reading over the VRTK documentation I managed to write a script that extends on existing VRTK scripts that when the player has hold of an object and touches something with that object the controller gives feedback by shaking. Even though the objects aren't physically there, this simple form of feedback gave the sensation you were in fact touching something. At that moment it baffled me how easily you can trick the brain in virtual reality. Something that would come in useful in later stages this project. Armed with a lot of new knowledge I was excited to work on more challenges feats and set my eyes on a working automatic weapon, including all the small working parts like removing the magazine, pulling the cocking mechanism and firing. For this I had to not only read up a lot on using VRTK but I've learned a lot of already existing Unity functions aswell. All of which can be put to good use both during and after this semester. With a good set of knowledge about developing virtual reality applications in Unity I set this personal project aside and started working on the KLM assignment: making an operatable aircraft door in virtual reality. Comments are closed.
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