weareVR Hackathon

I was one of the many participants of this wonderful hackathon aimed at VR/Game developers all over the world, held in Berlin from 3^rd August to 19^th August. We were supposed to propose novel solutions to a virtual helicopter cockpit by not emulating the existing cockpit setup but re-designing to utilize the full power of VR.

Proposed Idea

Tools & Softwares Used

Unreal Engine 5.0, Arcgis, Cesium for Unreal Engine, Oculus Quest 2, Photoshop and ArcGIS CityEngine

Team Information

Rahul - VR Development Using Unreal Engine (C++/Blueprint) and some UI designing using Photoshop and research on Arcgis and Cesium for Game Engine

Palaniappan Mohan - UI designing using Photoshop, 3D City designing using Arcgis CityEngine and research on Arcgis and Cesium for Game Engine

Project Description

The project was setup completely in Unreal Engine 5.0 and it was designated to run on Oculus Quest 2 VR device. The development spanned over a period of two weeks - I was mostly working on it after my work hours. The aim was to sort of bring a balance between the existing setup and pitch in some level of invovation. This way we make it easier for people to relate with the existing setup and possible updation that could make things a lot easier to comprehend. Here's a video recording that demonstrates the solution we pitched on this hackathon.

We ensured that there is a good amount of interaction involved in the application so that the participants will feel a great level of immersion thereby detatching themselves from the real world. Most of the controls can only be operated by physical movement of your hands which in turns drives the helicopter around in the scene. For example: To hold the flight control stick you move your hand next to stick and press a button on the Oculus quest 2 controller and then as you move your hand in the real world the control stick follows your hand position which drives the helicopter along the position of the stick/hand.

The 3D environment, Tempelhof Field, choosen for the application is constructed in Arcgis CityEngine. This provided us an opportunity to place a real world environment with some realistic terrain and obstacles so the participants can get a better look and feel along with a significant level of immersiveness. We tried to use GIS plugins for game engines such as Cesium and ARCGis to load the 3D model on the fly but later dropped the plan since we couldn't find a free city model for Berlin that could be loaded into the application on the fly.