Unity: A Rekindling of a Virtual Spark

Unity is a game engine originally launched in 2005 (Samuel Axon, 2016), aimed to make game development more accessible and enable more people to work on it. I started using it about 7 years ago at the time of writing, in 2013, and I've used it sporadically since then.

This last Mixed Realities class we where introduced to it, many for the first time. I spent some time familiarizing myself with it, and then helping others on their first steps into it.

I'm lucky enough to own a VR headset (The HTC vive), so once I got home I launched Unity, set it up, and started playing around.

I followed a tutorial by Valem to start off with, learning the basics of the unity XR plugin. Then expanded (Not shown in this video).

I mostly focused on the visual sense, as that was the easiest to fool given the technology. I tried using some haptic feedback by making the controllers vibrate slightly when you did things like teleport or grab something.

Although, the sense of presence wasn't much reduced, at least for me, which may just be a symptom of me spending a lot of my life immersing myself in worlds within a screen. At one point I was testing some UI fixes I had done, and looked over to my other hand (I had left the controller, and thus my virtual hand on the desk outside of the bounding area), and tried to teleport closer to it rather than walk.

References:
1. Axon, S. (2016, September 27). Unity at 10: For better—or worse—game development has never been easier. Ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/09/unity-at-10-for-better-or-worse-game-development-has-never-been-easier/