Overview / Usage

This VR experience the player is a giant placed in the middle of a city where they have to defend themselves from dinosaurs. Dinosaurs can be defeated by throwing things at them. The player can grab parts of a building or trees and move them / throw them around. The buildings are basically towers of cubes stuck up, so it's quite fun to tear them down / push them towards the dinosaurs.

This experience works on SteamVR-compatible headsets and is a Room-Scale experience where position tracking of the player and controllers matters. I did make an adaptation for mobile VR as well that works only with the reticle, but it's much more limited.

Technical challenges included the physics simulation of the towers of cubes. Basically with Unity's default physics system and settings, when stacking many cubes on top of each other, they "bounce" a little bit due to calculation rounding error. This caused the towers to collapse even when a physics material with 0 bounciness was used. The only solution was to decrease the timestep simulation of the physics engine. Yet still the towers move a little bit for no reason. This takes of course a toll on the CPU usage. If the game was polished to production level, those issues would need to be addressed, probably by using a custom physics engine for those elements.

Demo of this experience can be viewed on the trailer video here: https://academy.zenva.com/product/create-a-dinosaur-room-scale-experience-with-steamvr/

This game was created as part of the Virtual Reality Mini-Degree, my comprehensive training series on how to create VR games with Unity: https://academy.zenva.com/product/the-complete-virtual-reality-game-development-course/