Regenesis VR
The Unity global student challenge is a annual competition for students around the world to develop something that follows along a given theme within a time frame.
About
Event: Unity’s Global Student Challenge
Team: Anita He, Sanaa Memon, Peter Francis, Adriana Matic, Justin San Juan
Role: Programmer
Theme: Teach Me Something
Timeline: 3 Weeks
Overview
Goals
Design Goals
Create a learning experience that is both interesting and fun
Create a visually appealing and polished experience
Implementation of VR and Leap Motion
Game Design
Virtual Reality Standards
When using Virtual Reality for the first time I had very little experience with the design choices and standards of Virtual Reality products.
I researched how popular products of Virtual Reality have tackled core issues such as having a lack of physical feedback and the difficulty of player movement and player range of movement.
I looked towards Beat Saber one of VR’s most popular games at the moment.
Adapting to Industry Standards
Two things that I’ve taken from Beat Saber’s design is that If there is no feedback to begin with then show interactions with objects in a way that would make sense of the lack of feedback.
Which I’ve emulated by having the DNA strands have virtually no weight.
As well as avoiding the movement of the player to one spot.
Unraveling DNA
A programming task that the team was having trouble visualizing and implementing was allowing the player to unravel the strand through an input.
The old programmer tried to create a mesh that relied on Unity’s pivot components and thought to have the player physically grab the edges to unravel the strand.
I recommended using Unity’s animator to handle the different states and animate the base pairs depending on a blend tree variable.
At the end my solution was selected and I was able to make some simple key frames and animate the strand based on a variable.
Strand Touch and Movement
The design Issue I wanted to tackle was to overcome the lack of physical feedback found while playing VR games.
I felt that a great solution was to separate each segment of the DNA strand to allow for contact flexibility and individual movement.
Strand Placement
A programming task issue that I was given was the following and matching of base pairs to the DNA strand.
The solution I thought up to handle this issue was by making pairs even and odd numbers.
I could figure out if a base pair was compatible by comparing if the two pairs were both even numbers or odd.
Afterwards
What I’ve learnt
Researching the standard of the industry is important because rediscovering the wheel takes time and effort.