Introduction

A full-fledged theme park VR experience complete with an automated ride on Oculus Rift following the journey of the Dog, Togo, who saved the village of Nome.

My Contributions

I was a programmer in this project. I also helped with some visual effects.

• Created and integrated water splash using Maya Bifrost
• Simulated ice-floor cracking and shattering using Pull Down It plugin.
• Optimized Unity scenes involving massive terrains, shaders and particle effects.
• Implemented player ride journey and environment.

Design Challenges

• The journey was set in the arctic lands of Alaska. This meant huge vast terrains that impeded with performance and required to be optimized through occlusion culling.
• The environment required to be dark and foggy due to the nature of the artics. Allowing just the right visibility for a ride moving continuously was a challenge.
• The ride involves a bear chase. Having the bear appear such that the rider takes note of it was a challenge in VR since naive VR users do not understand the 360 degree nature of it.
• Importing bifrost animations into Unity wasn't supported natively. Maya exports and alembic which needs to be imported via a plugin.

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