Overview / Usage

Real escape the room venues are great, but there is are inherent issues with replay ability and space. While lack of replay ability is self-explanatory, the space limitations are maybe not so obvious. The escape the room venues can only have so much space, and can only create a limited number of experiences for their customers, experiences that get stale once completed. The goal of this project is to explore whether current state-of-the-art VR is a viable alternative to solve both of the problems listed above.

Methodology / Approach

We have approached development from an industry standard PoV. We took the Vive VR plugin for Unity which works well with OpenVR (unified VR platfrom that seamlessly integrates with other VR platforms).

The biggest issue with the overall experience is mapping physical interactions into the game, as the user's hand are physically unbound in the real-world. Because of this we had to scale down the initial ambitions we had for the project.

The Alienware PC is an ideal hardware platform for our development needs. It is a power house that allows us to iterate very fast and allows us to concentrate on what's important to us - creating content.

The Oculus VR with hand motion controllers is also a breeze to set up and very easy to use and iterate with. A big plus is that it's compliant with the OpenVR platform along with other major VR headsets and that allows us to develop with one platform and have confidence that the experience will translate to other VR headsets.

Disclaimer
This project was seeded with an Alienware PC and a Oculus VR headset and motion controllers. While this has in no way impacted our views about the hardware, we still felt it was necessary to be up-front about this aspect.

Technologies Used

Alienware PC
Oculus VR set
Unity, Visual Studio, Blender, Photoshop
Unity Valve VR plugin, OpenVR

Other links

• Play the demo

Collaborators