Spinifex Group worked together with GPJ to create a fun and engaging interactive experience for the official string supplier to the Australian Open, Yonex.
Visitors to the booth tested their skills in a “guitar hero” like experience. Scores were recorded and displayed on a leader-board. The lucky person on top at the end of the day received a prize.
There was a constant line of visitor eager to play
As mentioned here on GPJ’s website 4800 fans played 125 hours over 16 days!
Game play
An Arduino was used to gather the hits on the pads and the game was developed in Unity.
Some of the major element that went into developing the app included:
I was lead developer in creating one of the interactives in the VISA San Francisco office.
The 100-inch touchscreen displayed 3D cubes that when touched would open with information for the user to learn about different areas of VISA.
The app was connected to a local CMS and also to a larger system that used network messaging to change the mode of the interactive depending on if staff were interacting with it or a tour was taking place.
Touchscreen in action.
As part of the installation I visited the site to assist and make final changes. Was a great experience and enjoyed seeing the US team face-to-face.
This installation was developer for the Royal Australia Air Force and displayed at the Australian International Airshow – Avalon 2019.
The project consisted of 2 applications developed in Unity. An Android app running on 16 Samsung tablets and a PC app running on a highly spec’ed PC, in a 15 metre dome with 8 projectors and speakers.
Some of the technology used for this installation included Omnity for the projection output, KlakNDI for the NDI output required by the projectionists, UNET for communication between the apps, Curvy Splines for plane paths, Post Processing Stack for visual effects. To keep things G rated Bad Word Filter PRO was used and Zenject for gluing it all together, also taking advantage of its pooling for spawning/despawning planes.
The PC had a 6th gen i7, 32GB RAM and was running a RTX 2080 ti. The tablets were Samsung Galaxy Tab S2. The NDI signal ran over a 10GBE card for the bandwidth required. The tablets used a POE switch for power and connectivity so we did not have to rely on WiFi which has a tendency to be flaky at public shows like this and constant connectivity is a must.
The projection app was also built in VR using SteamVR for internal and client reviews.
Unity 2018.3 was used for the projection app and was interesting to find new features and locations of settings and also to be able to use KlakNDI. The Android app used 2018.2.
The installation ran for 6 days on average for 12 hours a day.
Spin the 360 panorama below to see the site before the start of the day (at around 7am!)
Many were involved in the project including 3D artists, animators, sound artists, producers, technical directors and myself as the developer and onsite technical director. Massive project that was a team effort.
A constant flow of people kept the numbers in the dome anywhere from 10 to 50 – except when the fighter jets were blasting past outside and shaking the dome so everyone would rush out to catch the action.
This demo was constructed over a few days for use in an Oculus Go. This was my first app built using the Go. I am very impressed with its resolution and comfort. Development wise I used Easy Input for Gear VR and Oculus Go. It was great to use and had me up and running with the controller very quick.
This was a quick demo put together with free or very inexpensive models for Veterinary Science to show their students. Something I did use here for the first time was something I had bought in the Asset Store a while ago, Mesh Baker. It combines meshes and materials to reduce draw calls. I filled the shelves full of items which killed performance, using Mesh Baker it reduced the draw calls and it was super smooth again.
“Curator SVV allows you to measure visual-vestibular biais in Virtual Reality. 10 tilted famous paintings are presented on a black background. With a remote gamepad, you will adjust the painting to straighten/level it, as you would do with a painting on a wall.”
This is the description given for the research app I developed for the OpenLab. There is an actual physical test used in hospitals that places people in a pitch black environment and asks them horizontally align an object using a remote control. It’s quite a setup and not portable at all.
This app aims to replicate the usage of the hospital setup using a standalone VR headset that can be used anywhere. Currently the app works on Gear VR and Oculus Go – you can find it here – Curator SVV
The results of the test is output to a CSV file, this includes, in degrees, the starting position of the painting, the final corrected position from the user, the users head position, the time taken for each painting and a few others.
The app has been slowly evolving since it’s original release. There are several “conditions” that can now be applied to the scene instead of it being all black. A rotating sphere of dots rotating in either direction and at alternative speeds is one and surrounding the painting with a tilted frame in either a positive or negative rotation is the others.
It’s very interesting watching people use the app, for example, with the rotating dots, almost always people start to lean the direction of the rotation. Also when rotating the painting the same direction as the dots, there is a dot rotation speed that almost matches the painting rotation speed – people swear the painting is not rotating… until they realise it has!
Being the first app I’ve put into the Oculus App Store it was a learning experience also – there is a lot of documentation online, you will find most of it on the official site – https://developer.oculus.com/ but you will have to dig for it.
“The free exhibit, presented by Westpac, is designed to highlight diversity and equality through the stories of 200 women from around the world.
It’s an extension of Westpac’s support of the storytelling project and book of the same name, 200 Women: who will change the way you see the world. It is founded on 200 interviews with women in different parts of the world and different circumstances, who are asked five fundamental questions on the theme: ‘what is most important to them’. ”
Made with Unity, This interactive used sensors to detect people approaching the pod it was build into. It would automatically take the user through the interactive to display one of the videos it contained. If the user interrupted the sequence they would then have control of the app and could make their own selection.
There was 8 pods with 8 different themes with a total of near 100 unique videos. Collating and organising the content in a manageable method was vital to this project. All the data was stored locally and was referenced via JSON.
Zenject worked very nicely and using it’s Signals feature is one of my favourite parts of it, LeanTween was perfect for the sequencing of transitions required, a good thing to remember when using it is to make sure you cancel tweens when needing to abruptly change a transition. AVPro is an excellent video player plugin, it’s feature for subtitles was a major factor in choosing it for this project. Soft Mask does what Unity should do when you are masking UI and softens edges so there is no noticeable aliasing. Google Analytics SDK was used to easily send data to Google Analytics.
It was a great project to work with the crew at Webling. It threw a few interesting design challenges due to the circle screen, but the design took care of that nicely. Having the opportunity to work on something that was displayed at an iconic landmark was also great.
Here is a (rather crudely as it was rather hot so I just did it one take on my phone!) 360 view of the space. Click and drag to move it around.
A video by one of the other partners in the project.
This is a Virtual Reality project built in Unity for the HTC Vive.
Purchasing a property off-the-plan can be a risky proposition, the objective of this project is to allow the potential buyer the ability to step into the property before it exists via Virtual Reality.
The buyer has the ability to visit areas of the property, configure elements such as floors and walls, see a running budget of such changes, take photos that will be sent via email after the experience and save their custom configurations for quick comparisons. Using room-scale, the user can walk around the area within the confines of the Vive’s play area.
Configurations can be saved and quickly compared.
The seller has the ability to show exactly how the property will look as it has been based of the architectural plans, users dwell times and preferences are all track and the analytics of such data can help for current and future projects.
View from the kitchen
View from balcony in the evening
The project is built using the StrangeIoC framework, as it is built for Vive it uses the SteamVR plugin, also from Valve “The Lab Renderer” has been used and for the controllers VRTK.
Also mixed reality has been looked into to showcase the app further – here are a couple test shots.
