Project Goals

This project was created for a booth at the 2016 Indiana Black Expo. It consisted of 3D visualizations of orbital paths used in three different space missions and VR game where players collected space trash to combat Kessler syndrome. The goal of the project was to get kids excited about science, drum up some interest in Purdue’s aerospace department, and provide common talking points at the expo booth. A leader board was kept to award prizes to high-scoring players at the end of each day. The client also wanted expo guests to be able to download and run the application on their phones for maximum accessibility. For this reason, Google Cardboard was chosen as the deployment platform.

Development

This project was quite enjoyable to work on. The scope and time frame were refreshing compared to the more involved simulations I have worked on. The sci-fi theming was fun to work with. Our senior artist was really into the project and flexed his creativity a bit more than most of our other, more academic projects would allow.

There were a number of challenges that came with developing for Google Cardboard, though. First, all of the rules for avoiding simulator sickness in VR still apply, but there is also no translation tracking. Second, the control scheme has to be extremely simple. There is only one button.

The game portion of Green Space limited simulator sickness by placing the player in a spaceship cockpit in a static starfield with Earth out the left window. The only thing that moved was the debris. This grounded the player in the environment and helped them feel stable. By placing the player and the in-game camera in a stationary seated position, the negative impacts of 3-DoF tracking were minimized.

To handle the one button problem, the game used a look-and-click control scheme, where the player lined up a reticle with whatever they wanted to interact with, then pressed the button on the Cardboard. The game had two methods of disposing of trash. So the button was used for the laser, while holding the reticle over a piece of debris would pull it in with the tractor beam.

Designing the UI was quite fun in this project, because VR is really only compatible with world-space UI. I was tasked with representing all relevant information appropriately and fitting it onto the cockpits instruments. Seeing the ships panels come to life with real-time feedback felt awesome.