A video demonstration is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icfFvPku_0A
Prop-oriented World Rotation (POWR) is an experimental technique to enable games to map objects from the user's physical environment to objects in the virtual world. For example, the user's bed in their room reinforces a crate in the virtual world. This allows the users to benefit from haptic feedback from the virtual world without needing any bespoke prop or device.
A game was developed to demonstrate this technique. The game is a shooter (similar to Time Crisis) where you shoot all the robots to advance to the next checkpoint. Each checkpoint has a virtual object the player uses for cover, scaled and mapped to a physical object in the user's room. The crate object is mapped to the bed, and any door object in the game is mapped to the room door. This allows the player to intuitively lean on/use the physical objects, resulting in fewer collisions with objects around their room and increasing immersion.
The demonstration game was developed over four weeks using the Unity game engine and the SteamVR SDK.
The associated academic paper for this project has now been published! Please read here.
Originally Submitted for the MSc in Computer Science at the University of Kent (Received 78% - Distinction)
This project won the award for best poster/demo at VRST 2021 as voted for by conference participants.
- Implementation of "POWR" in a demonstration game.
- A variety of enemies and obstacles with their own logic.
- Wave-based shooting mechanics.
