GMU:Critical VR Lab I/Nyiko Mucavele

Sand sailing VR experience concept

Concept: A calm experience of sailing sand dunes in VR, or not and looking after some plants in the back of your boat. I really enjoyed the sense of scale you can get very quickly by making huge terrain platforms and its a very liberating feeling to just roam the empty virtual spaces freely in my experience. This concept should work for both VR and non VR usage and is currently leaning into the territory of what might be considered a game concept.

Some concept work modelled and rendered in blender:

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For VR this top down area shows the space in which the user can freely walk around it

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I was thinking of having some interactions like being able to manually move the sail and the rudder by mapping sail height to acceleration and rotation of the rudder to rotation of the boat, with the VR hands to steer the vehicle but this would only make sense exclusively for VR.

After spending lots of time trying out ways to move the boat around with constraints and joints to the Unity standard asset character types (first person, ball, third person) I realised that glueing a bunch of different forces together doesn't seem to make for a good physics situation im going to resort to the internet to get this boat moving properly. As despite spending many hours playing around with the physics and properties of objects it seems unlikely ill find a stable solution with trail and error.

Here are some of the more interesting failed attempts.

After trying out the terrain tools and physics out more I am considering pursuing something similar but with procedural generated endless map and more 'exploration' feeling than gameplay based.