Keywords: Unity - ARCore - Mixed Reality - ARKit - WMR - 360 Video - HDRP - Realistic - 4K resolution - Interaction - Human touch - Resonance Audio - NDA - Animation - Timeline- Image recognition - VR Cardboard - Shader - New Input System  - Backing Light - Unity Collaboration - Communication - tech lead - technical artist - Cinema 4D - Maya - 3Ds Max - Mixamo - Android - IOS

Overview

          Social space was one of our solution for a 10 week collaboration project between SCAD and Deloitte Digital in 2019. SCAD pro projects are collaboration between SCAD and different companies. The companies would bring their challenges and resources to a group of students from different majors to design and develop solutions and communicate at all project stages with the students. For NDA purposes I can only explain the technicality of our project. As the tech lead, my main responsibility was to guide our non Unity user artists to create and deliver a high quality VR experience in 4K resolution using Windows mixed reality platform, in Unity. and develop and design AR solution for the project.
Social space Final version 2019 - The video is cut and muted for NDA purposes

Development and Challenges

          Although the whole project was in 10 weeks, the prototype team only had the last two weeks to develop the solution due to waiting for research and design team. As the tech lead I was part of the research and design team too and I was the link to connect design, research and development. Using the right language and communication was the key when speaking to different people from different majors and background. My biggest challenge was to push our Unreal engine artists to learn Unity quick, fast and effective. Base on our researches, we needed a realistic VR environment. For that reason I chose a WMR headset, HP reverb 1 which had 4K resolution so the user could see the details and read texts easily. but that would need a lot of hardware power. In order to have realistic image in such a resolution, I chose HDRP to be our render pipeline. Using HDRP with right setting would make it very optimize and fast. With my experience in my previous game Cor Domus, I was able to create shaders and baking lights quickly using the GPU light baking. We used an i7 CPU and GTX 2070 graphic card. To make our environment even more realistic we used Google's Resonance Audio in Unity. I also used the new Inpus system and Unity's XR to remove Mixed reality toolkit usage to make our development faster and easier. I also developed an AR app as part of our solution for both Android and ARKit using Unity. Where the user could scan pictures in a catalog and a 360 video relative to the picture would show up.
Social Space Renders during the play mode 2019