Client: Discovery Place Science
Date: April 30, 2018
Categories: SimWave / Virtual Reality
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58ElIRAMF8Y
For Inside Tours, I acted as Lead Developer through the project, overseeing its development through several staffing changes.
During the primary development cycle, I worked on:
- almost all of the sound design/implementation
- analyzing the amplitude of audio files to provide the automatic mouth movements of Zoey the Robot
- developing the HMD-related features of the experience, such as detecting when the HMD was taken off to reset for the next user
- big fixes
Once primary development was done, I was flown down to Charlotte, NC to do the installation and acted as the Support contact to Discovery Place as issues arose in the wild. I set up several scripts to launch the experience on startup and hide any extraneous launchers (Oculus/Steam) that would potentially push their way into the foreground. On top of that, I worked to help source parts as they broke, provided manuals for changing out hardware and maintaining the machines we had provided them, and flew back on a few occasions to help with hardware migration.
The experience was initially developed for the Oculus Rift, but after several months and numerous broken HMDs, Discovery Place had designed a custom fitting to mount an HTC Vive into to provide better durability and longevity. I’d reworked small parts of the experience to ensure that they worked correctly with the Vive and continued maintaining the machines until the end of the Support contract.
Role: Lead Developer/Support
Time on Project: Sept 2017 – Apr 2018
Technology used: Unreal Engine 4
Language(s) used: C++, Blueprints, Bash