ARVR

Introduction

Alrighty, here I am back again this week with another task in CS491. So, I am kind of working in a group on this awesome VR project. We are building a series of scenes based on Halloween theme. The task was to scale up everything around the player by a factor of 10. For example, let’s consider the player reading a book which is usually 12 inches wide, 12 inches long when open and let the thickness be 1 inch. You will be pretty comfortable in reading this book. Right? Let us scale up everything by a factor of 10. So now the book is 10 feet wide and long. While imagining this, I felt like a fly which will trouble the imaginary giant reader sitting on a giant chair. This seems pretty lame but in-fact, worm’s eye view can be amazing sometimes. Let us dive into each aspect.

Technical Aspects.

In the beginning, when I just scaled all the objects by a factor of 10, I didn't really bother about the camera height from the ground. The height was close to the origin which was the middle of the room in the original scale. In the enlarged scale, the height was still close to the origin, so, on playing the scene, all I could deduce was the difference in speed. Which is kind of obvious? Movement of the player is guided by a constant figure of displacement in any directions, When things are scaled up, so is the distance to be covered but the displacement in one scene is still constant. So I felt its gonna take forever to just make it to the end of the room. So from now onwards, if something is not dependent on the scale of the room, I will call it a constant figure.

Light

There is a point source of light in each room along with thunder sounds, which is a constant figure placed at the origin of the room. When the room is scaled up, the light seems to be stuck in the middle of the room and only appears on the objects which are near the origin of the room.

Objects above the ground

There are a few objects which were placed so close to the ground that they appeared to be on the ground. But there was some offset from the ground. When this offset was scaled up and it went close to the height of the player in the room, the object no more seemed to be on the ground but elevated from the ground. This sets a pretty nice example when we need to closely examine all the details in the scene. We can just scale up to maybe 50x and remove such offsets so when scaled back to normal again they are (1/50)x the original.

Particle Animations

This was really a lesson learned in a tough way. We have a particle animation above the witch cauldron(shown in above picture) which emits bubbles, which look pretty good in the original scale. When I scale up the room. The cauldron scales up too. The particle animation is actually child object of the cauldron but they don’t scale up. The bubbles actually look like a small something but bubbles. Another example of particle animation could be the fire in the witch’s room. The torch seems pretty lit up on the normal scale but on the 10x it looks like a candle. :D

Other Animations

There is a blue spider in Witch’s room which goes from floor to roof on the wall and moves by a constant figure. In the upscaled mode, the spider moved very slowly because of the obvious reasons.

Unique Aspect

Let me give you a reason for this not being so lame that it cannot have a single application. In other words, let me give you an application where this can seem to be pretty useful. Imagine we have a proper working model of the human body, which take into account the blood pressure and the thickness of the nerves along with the actual material of the nerves. By the nerve material, I refer to the micro-cracks in the nerves which give a passage to blood plasma to reach too deep cells. How will you feel to be inside such a body and observing things closely? Amazing, Right? Another application which comes to my mind is training micro-robots using actual robots. We really don’t need a working prototype of a robotic insect if we have adopted this technique. We can scale things up around a normal robot and make it feel like a micro robot or maybe a worm and train it accordingly. Third application cannot be more obvious than Entertainment, Entertainment and Entertainment !!!!!! Go and watch Ant Man.

Conclusion

Never hardcode anything. The above line is something which I can take home after this exercise. I should have actually made the values dependent on a particular global variable so as to make sure that they scale up accordingly with other objects.