VR Escape Room: Conclusion

~ 3 Minute Read.

This is the fith and fi­nal post in a se­ries about the vir­tu­al re­al­i­ty es­cape room project I did to­geth­er with Daniel Bo­gen­rieder and Rox­anne Low at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Kon­stanz.

Win­dow Break­ing

At one point, the play­er is sup­posed to fig­ure out he can throw a chair us­ing his grav­i­ty gun to break a win­dow that keeps him from grab­bing a key float­ing out­side of the room.

The plan was to sim­u­late the break­ing of the win­dow in Blender to then im­port the an­i­ma­tion and play it on col­li­sion with the chair. Turns out that this is pret­ty per­for­mance heavy if you use too many shards and bake all the physics to keyframes.

Rox­anne re­did the an­i­ma­tion mul­ti­ple times (I great­ly ad­mire the pa­tience she had with this) and it turned out pret­ty amaz­ing in the end. See it in the video of the full playthrough be­low. (The ma­te­ri­al has a lit­tle bug in that ver­sion, but you’ll be able to ex­trap­o­late the idea.)

Full Playthrough

This es­cape room is very lo­ca­tion bound; it ob­vi­ous­ly on­ly works well if your are in the room that match­es the vir­tu­al repli­ca­tion. Be­cause of that and be­cause of it is rather space con­sum­ing na­ture, we do not plan to re­lease it. To still give you a taste of the ex­pe­ri­ence, we cut to­geth­er some re­cod­ings of a full playthrough:

Con­clu­sion

One of my goals was get­ting to know Uni­ty, which I did, more broad­ly than in depth, but enough to get the gist and get back to it should a project present a fit­ting use case.

I am very hap­py about how this project turned out: work­ing to­geth­er with Daniel and Rox­anne was a great plea­sure. Of­ten, group projects end up in a very in­equal dis­tri­bu­tion of work. If you are re­al­ly un­lucky, you may even find peo­ple on your team ne­glect­ing the project en­tire­ly and you try­ing to ei­ther work ex­tra for the miss­ing mem­ber or putting your en­er­gy in mo­ti­vat­ing them. This time I had to ac­tu­al­ly fight to not be the slack­ing guy my­self—the oth­ers were do­ing so much!

My per­son­al high­light was the pre­sen­ta­tions. I love speak­ing and the pre­sen­ta­tions were just so easy this time. We were ba­si­cal­ly able to “wing it”, just as­sign­ing the slides Rox­anne beau­ti­ful­ly de­signed, be­cause ev­ery­body had the full pic­ture and with Rox­anne and Daniel both be­ing great speak­ers then freely en­ter­tained the au­di­ence with what we had to say. 1

Fi­nal­ly, in case you work at a VR Ar­cade or es­cape room and need some de­vs, let’s talk. I will be co­or­di­nat­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion via Vhite Rab­bit. If you pre­fer you may al­so con­tact Daniel and Rox­anne di­rect­ly via their LinkedIn pro­files. Both ex­pressed ten­ta­tive in­ter­est in free­lanc­ing on such a project in the fu­ture.

1
No­body was snor­ing or showed any sig­nal of bore­dom at least, so I think it was al­right. And we were vot­ed for best pre­sen­ta­tion and de­mo by our col­legues. *Boast*

Writ­ten in 33 min­utes, ed­it­ed in 10 min­utes.