Project 3 builds off of the concept of our previous project. except now we had to treat the entire building as modifiable space. The professor wanted us to implement functional levers to modify the scene, as well as teleportation, all the while decorating the scenes with models and textures.

Once again, this project was designed by both Ian Ubaldo and myself. If you're interested in looking at Ian's other works, you can find his page here.

Me and Ian decided to collaborate to create a project inspired heavily off of the games made by the Korean game company, Project Moon. More specifically, we took heavily influence from both Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina.

The games' narrative focuses on a sort of dystopian future, where there exist creatures that are very similar to that of the ones in the SCP Fictional Universe. While we still have our old kiosk that was inspired by specific characters in the previous project, we took some of the areas around the map to dedicate to both characters and factions of Library of Ruina, specifically the Index and Thumb factions, and the characters Binah and Hokma, depicted in the image. We took the floors of the building and modified them

The audio used for this project came from a google drive folder compiling the game assets of Library of Ruina, which can be found here. All credit for the drive goes to user Lunartique01, and credit for the assets goes to Project Moon once again.

The audio that we used as both music, and both as proximity based/interacted with sounds, can be found here. The sounds played from multiple different sources within the scene.

1. ch8_Hokma.wav

2. ch8_Binah.wav

3. Binah 1.wav

4. Hokma 1.wav

5. Enemy 1.wav

6. Theme03.wav

7. Mili - Children of The City.wave

8. ch1_BackStreets.wav

The remaining audio sounds were filled out using by adding sounds for the melee items in the scene, which can also be found in the assets of Lobotomy Coporation.

Overall, the performance on the quest seemed to hold steady, even steadier than before on the second project. The reason we believe this is the case is due to the spread of objects out across the scene rather than there being a lot of clutter, meaning there is never a moment where too many vertexes are being calculated at a time. We say this as the kiosk, where plenty of items also were before, ended up being the portion of our project with the worst performance. While you need to populate environments for them to feel lively, you need to ensure that you don't put too many heavy models next to each other.

In the previous project, the most notable decrease in framerate was when one was holding an item. However, even this seems to not be an issue anymore, likely due to the fact that this time, there was no heavy lighting affecting any of the held items.

If I were interested in introducing someone to a new building demonstrated, the process involves hooking up the person to VR, letting them explore the building, while answering questions/clarifications they have during the exploration. However, given that these people likely have little to no background knowledge of VR, I believe it would be necessary to include a demo that performs on a much smaller scale. Instead of a whole building, there would be a small room, kitted out with the sorts of functionalities that the user would see in a real room or VR space, and show them how it works through VR. This process would include moving and looking around, alongside all the different interaction types one could have (Pulling levers, shifting dials, grabbing objects, etc). The goal of this would be not only to help acclimate users to VR, but also give them time to get accommodated and adjust their settings before jumping head first into exploration.

Following this, I think the VR serves as an excellent medium through which to preview 3-Dimensional objects. This is due to the fact that with a cost significantly lower than that of real building, you can create practically the same environment through VR. Granted, this is still a very long and extensive process, specifically due to the fact that recreating all the little details of the buildings still takes a long amount of time. However, that’s exactly the strength of VR - getting all the little details. Using the scale of the VR user, one can model the buildings to a perfect degree, using modeling, texturing, and lighting to recreate the floors, the furniture, the rooms, etc. What’s even more interesting is that through knowledge of how to code alongside this, you can mimic even the functionalities of the buildings themselves: doors, elevators, technologies, etc. Even more significant is that since each person likely has different aspects they put value on, you can design around putting more emphasis on the aspects that matter.

I think the best way to go about showing a person a building through VR would be to streamline the process of looking through everything. After the introductory demo, I believe it would still be best to keep the user outside for a while, and let them stand or float around the building, getting a feel for it fully visually. The mobility in VR enables perspectives that would be difficult to capture in real life, and from there, I think the user could choose an area to explore internally. There would be a little menu that enables you to choose a new perspective/area open at all times, meaning the user has easy access to a way to move around the scene on a larger scale. However, within each area still remains the normal capabilities used in the demo. Users will already be accustomed to all the actions they may take, since they would have been presented already in the demo, leading to the best experience of exploration as possible.