This Thursday, it would be Soft Opening day, where faculty rotates around projects to learn about what’s almost done! For our project, we decided to showcase Sample Scene 2.0 in the CAVERN, and walk faculty through our toolkit in our project room.
Sample scene
We fixed all the bugs that from Playtest day, and the following showcases a full run-through of the sample scene interactions.
The goal of the sample scene is to evoke a sense of immersion for stereoscopic rendering and surround sound, demo the interaction building blocks we created, and prove the performance of our camera through various technical art features.
Interactions
There are 4 states of the creature, each showcasing different aspects of the sample scene.
- State 1 Flying Animation: Starting from a tree hole, a small creature flies around the space (a big creature is constantly present in the center), smelling flowers going around while making cute creature sounds. The flying around guides the users attention across CAVERN to see various art, and with the 3D sounds, surround sound is also showcased.
- State 2 Whining: The creature crouches in the ground, whining (0.75 3D sound playing – partly 3D but partly 2D to make up for the silent side speakers). The creature will stay there until the guests uses the Vive Tracker bound to Right Shoulder to pick it up.
- State 3 Mirroring: After using the Vive Tracker to pick the creature up, the creature will mirror-follow the Vive Tracker. In addition, the surround sound from the flying animation will resume, allowing guests to play with both tracking and spatialized audio. When the creature gets near a spot beside the big creature, a vfx will show up to indicate there is something going to happen. If the guests stay there for more than 4 seconds, the creature will exit mirroring state and enter the next state.
- State 4 Hugging: The little creature fly towards the big creature, and they share a warm hug. Afterwards, the little creature flies back to the tree hole, and the experience starts again from the top.
Tech Art features
Toolkit feature walkthrough
We walked through faculty how how our toolkit works, along with documentation that supports it. We especially spent time on describing and showcasing how our UI makes it intuitive for users to add a CAVERN setup, add Vive Trackers, add interaction building blocks, auto configuration of 7.1 surround sound, the live preview gizmo, and the debug keys.
The following is the how the final UI looks at the end of the semester.
Feedback from faculty
The good news is that faculty felt that we were exceeding expectations, and they really liked that we’re doing a second jam (we set a record by having documentation and 1 game jam by halves, and now we’re doing a second one!).
In addition, they encouraged us to update your toolkit and documentation frequently. They stated the needs for tutorials to help start up and how common ways things can go wrong and ways to troubleshoot. These are all currently in progress, so we’re happy to discover that we are indeed on the right track.
Orbbec Body Tracking
On the other hand, Orbbec Femto Bolt tracking is still under development, we decided to adapt the open source Azure Kinect body tracking sample to an Orbbec one that will work in CAVERN.
There were many obstacles to overcome:
- The cameras had individual IDs, yet they can only be detected after entering play mode, manually checking the IDs, then inserting them to the code. We have to simplify this process like we did Vive Trackers.
- If there are no cameras plugged into the computer, the project will crash. For a toolkit, we need to prevent this from happening.
- The center orbbec camera is flipped upside down due to installation error. However, if we ignored this, past projects will break. Instead our toolkit should handle any orientation of the camera.
- There are 3 cameras in total, and we need to find a way to sync them up, or choose which ones are tracking.
We are tackling them one by one. Stay tuned for updates in the following weeks. But firstly, next Monday would be CAVERN Jam 2.0, and getting everything ready is our other main priority.