BAE Working at Heights
A VR Climbing Experience created in Unity
Contracted by BAE
In my third year I had the amazing experience of working with BAE Systems on creating a VR experience involving heights. The particular details of the project, its code and its usage aren't something I can publicly disclose, but I am able to show this footage. You start from the bottom floor, and climb and traverse the scaffold, ducking and weaving through the environment to reach the top of the ship.
I am personally responsible for the entire VR experience ranging from; locomotion, the tool belt, implementing tools, the ladder climbing and the late addition of sound. Additionally, I was responsible for the design of the project, the implementation of all assets into the scene and the creation of the programming, design and production documentation.
Although I have reservations with development of the project with some less than cooperative team members, I'm really quite proud of this. In particular the ladder climbing, as the player can seamlessly climb from rung to rung, and mount and dismount the ladder with ease. I truly feel that the sense of scale is truly convincing. You really do feel like a regular human, completely dwarfed by the dockyard and the ship and its scaffolding.
Performance in this project was actually quite difficult, you can't actually simplify scaffolding that much, and the ship has a lot of it. Our main solution was Unity's built in Occlusion Culling, as the Dockyard, all the buildings, the ships and the scaffold are all made into individual parts, so that these assets can be rendered as is seen appropriate. Sacrifices had to be made in areas of visual fidelity, as we had a minimum specification we had to meet for a Gaming Laptop, and the condition of the experience being in VR meant that we had to meet a 1440 x 1600 resolution twice each frame and at a 90hz refresh rate.
This project was my first "shipped" commercial project, and I'm quite honestly very proud of it. Although Covid has got in the middle of seeing it used properly, having a product reach a client, and building a project for a professional manner like this has been an enlightening experience and really exciting.
I am personally responsible for the entire VR experience ranging from; locomotion, the tool belt, implementing tools, the ladder climbing and the late addition of sound. Additionally, I was responsible for the design of the project, the implementation of all assets into the scene and the creation of the programming, design and production documentation.
Although I have reservations with development of the project with some less than cooperative team members, I'm really quite proud of this. In particular the ladder climbing, as the player can seamlessly climb from rung to rung, and mount and dismount the ladder with ease. I truly feel that the sense of scale is truly convincing. You really do feel like a regular human, completely dwarfed by the dockyard and the ship and its scaffolding.
Performance in this project was actually quite difficult, you can't actually simplify scaffolding that much, and the ship has a lot of it. Our main solution was Unity's built in Occlusion Culling, as the Dockyard, all the buildings, the ships and the scaffold are all made into individual parts, so that these assets can be rendered as is seen appropriate. Sacrifices had to be made in areas of visual fidelity, as we had a minimum specification we had to meet for a Gaming Laptop, and the condition of the experience being in VR meant that we had to meet a 1440 x 1600 resolution twice each frame and at a 90hz refresh rate.
This project was my first "shipped" commercial project, and I'm quite honestly very proud of it. Although Covid has got in the middle of seeing it used properly, having a product reach a client, and building a project for a professional manner like this has been an enlightening experience and really exciting.