NasChair VR - Second Year VR Project

NasChair VR was my VR project during second year, it was a proof of concept demo for a port of the collaborative game project I was working on at that time. I retained the main pushing locomotion mechanic, but to ensure that the project meet the brief, I changed the perspective to 1st person and changed engine to Unreal as this has native HTC Vive + Vive Tracker support, plus my experience with Blueprints means that I would be able to create a much more technically complete demo than if I had used Unity.

The demo was built in Unreal 4.18, over a 2 month period by myself. The player uses the headset to look around the environment, while the headset location is locked to the chair model, the chair is moved in relation to the chair the player is sat on in real life. This is done by the Vive tracker attached to the front of the chair that can be seen in the GIF above. The forward movement is controlled by the player who holds one of the two Vive controllers, with direction of travel for the chair being dictated by the direction that the chair is facing. Having this system in place makes the experience much more immersive and it closely follows how it would feel in real life.

Creating this project brought many advantages and granted many transferable skills, as having experience with VR equipment and having the ability to implement it in engine and link it with gameplay is a valuables skill in a professional development environment. It also lines up with my well with my future job goals as a lot of current racing game developers integrate VR into their titles (Dirt Rally and Gran Turismo) so having experience will definitely make me much more appealing to future employees.

A "proof of concept" video can be found here. My Trello Board for the project can also be seen here, this lists all of the features that I implemented, as well as showing of my ability to use this kind of tool.