This week, we worked on adding more interactable in the form of in-game videos as well as activities for both inside and outside of the ISS environment.
Overview
From the feedback from our playtest session, we were comfortable with the core experience for our astronaut simulator. Asides from notable adjustments needed to make the experience more tolerable movement-wise, we also needed to add features to make our VR experience stand out from existing VR space experiences. To this end, we began mocking various types of interfaces and interactions that would be key to deliver content that explored an astronaut's life beyond just that of a space walk, and ultimately differentiate our experience.
Activities
We built a system for building different interactions upon to create new activities for the player, using the affordance system and the treadmill activity that we implemented for our first week deliverable as the basis. The end goal is to have a variety of tasks and objects to interact with both inside and outside the ISS, but we have added an assortment of interactions this week.
Treadmill (previously implemented)
Implemented in the previous week, the core functionality of the treadmill exercise activity seems to work the way we want it to, and the only things we did with this interaction is to import all the necessary blueprints to the updated interior scene, as well as modify the current 3D model to be more accurate to what treadmills look like on the ISS.
Water Experiment
One of the interior interactions that we set out to implement was the well-known water in space activity, inspired from many videos of astronauts showing off how water behaves in a zero-gravity environment. We set about creating an experience mocking this in our own VR experience.
Eating Simulation
Eating, although something simple on Earth, takes different steps on the ISS. Inspired primarily from the video below, the activity seeks to emulate the experience of having to insert a dried food package into a hydration station in order to get food in an edible state. Currently it works much like a food vending machine, but the idea is for the hydration station to be able to take in differently labeled dried food packs and spawn food objects depending on the food pack.
ISS Exterior Repair
This activity requires the user to interact with the exterior of the ISS actor, mocking the repair activities that astronauts often perform when on the ISS.
UI
For use with specific points of interest in our experience, such instructions on how to interact with an activity, we implemented a UI system using Unreal’s widget and blueprint system. With it, we were able to get in-game UI and video to display in the environment and accompany the user as they are partaking in the various activities.
Interior
This week, we set about replacing our placeholder interior ISS scene with models and textures of the official NASA repository of the ISS interior. This required first importing into Blender, as well as lot’s of work with trying to get colliders working to make sure the player could spawn and grab surfaces correctly.
Future plans
Additional plans we had for the next week was to add sounds and more guidance to the VR experience, both suggestions from last week’s feedback. Although there is inherently no sound in space outside of the ISS, ambient sounds like breathing, rustling, as well as sounds from the machinery on the ISS would afford for a more immersive experience.
We also plan to implement guidance in the form of a viewable to-do list, either through a billboard-like interface or an interface that can be accessed anywhere, similar to a settings menu for typical VR games and applications. One other consideration was to feature a voiceover.
Lastly, we plan on making some tweaks to movement, including setting upper limits to movement speeds and overhauling to move away from look-based direction movement.