KIT
How we turned wood into a VR game
KIT
During the VR minor I made a team with fellow classmates and we got an assignment from KIT. We completed this assignment in roundabout 6 months time.
Because this was the teams first experience with VR the start was a bit rough. We still had a lot to figure out but it was awsome and I learned a whole lot.
You can watch the full trailer here:
https://youtu.be/6dpOf6czg5c?si=Ciz1VfDX1QuIHroC
The Wood Cabinet
This was the subject of our VR experience: The Xylotheque. More commonly referred to as the wood cabinet. During the colonial period of the Netherlands wood from overseas was stored here for further research.
There is more information here: https://witnessinstone.kit.nl/decoration/wood-cabinet/
The idea
The user of the game embark on a journey to construct the xylotheque by collecting three different wood samples discovered throughout the game. In the xylotheque, there is a map where players can place a pin to indicate where they want to go. There are three levels of difficulty: easy, normal, and hard. Each level is unlocked sequentially, so players must complete a level to unlock the next one. The xylotheque was filled between the years 1868 and 1916. We selected the countries Indonesia (1899), Suriname (1906), and Australia (1907) as level locations because significant amount of wood was sourced from these regions during that period.
To successfully gather these wood samples, players must engage in various challenges that require strategy and skill to progressively filling the xylotheque. As the game advances, the difficulty level increases, presenting users with more complex obstacles to overcome. Additionally, the game is designed to educate players about the colonial history associated with the wood industry and the principles of sustainability. This educational component is emphasized at both the beginning and the conclusion of the game, ensuring that players gain a comprehensive understanding of the environmental and historical significance of their actions within the game.
My work
In this project I did a lot of different things from lighting and occlusion culling to terrain generation and JSON files.
Let’s talk shortly about the terrain generation since I am very proud about making that.
The terrain
The feel of a VR experience is given by a lot of different factors, however the terrain is one of the important visual factors. This is a difficult factor in VR because making the terrain big en detailed is not really possible. This is because a VR headset has a lower amount of vertices it can handle then, for example, a computer.
I wanted to prevent the modeling team from putting too much time into terrain building so I made a tool which allowed us to sculp terrain easily using, among other things, perlin noise. It took me about 6 weeks to get it fully finished, the results are the pictures shown here.
To reduce the vertices that are rendered the terrain is split up into chunks. This allows chunks to not be rendered if they are not on screen and increases performance. Performance is important in a VR headset because it prevents users from becoming nauseous from a laggy response rate.
