The Virtual Recruiting Centre is a virtual reality application created for the Canadian Armed Forces Recruiting Group to attract potential candidates to learn more about the CAF. Players can explore a sandbox environment which includes 4 unique locations - the Hub room, the Halifax harbour, an air base, and an army base. Players can take part an a large variety of different experiences including a shooting range, Leopard tank driving, a helicopter rescue mission, clearance diving and much more.
I lead the development of this project at my current position working for the Department of National Defence. Working with a team of 2 other developers, I was responsible for the guidance of the project development as well as working with the stakeholders in terms of requirements gathering and QA.
Initial development took 6 months, with a final launch of the application taking place in 10 months. Working with the client, we procured and set up 52 portable virtual reality kits that recruiters take to public events.
The major challenge in the development of this application was creating an experience for users that have never touched virtual reality before. Because the application was used at public events, we needed to be careful with how we created the activites to ensure that it was accessible to everyone regardless of how much experience they had. This involved creating a variety of games to cater to different levels of experiences.
I designed and created the griffon helicopter activity controls as part of the Air Force activites within the game. Players would use the joystick to control the speed of the blades of the helicopter would spin, and by doing so would raise or lower the helicopter. The other joystick was used to control the direction the helicopter would lean which correlated with the direction it would go.
I created the environment for the activity which involved very strict rendering limits due to the GPU demand VR had. Priority was made for the interior of the helicopter's fidelity.
I was responsible for creating the controls for the Leopard A2 Tank activity which included the use of a virtual steering wheel and acceleration lever. The interior of the tank was separated from the exterior of the tank to optimize for performance. This allowed for the screens inside the tank to act like they would in reality. This also allowed the physics of the tank movement to not affect the controls of the player. In place of a gas pedal, a lever was used to create a simple way of accelerating.
I created a skydiving activity that was featured in the Air Force section of the application. The design of the skydiving scene was simply intended to replicate the emotional response people would get from games like Richies Plank Experience. The intent was to create a sense of fear.
When you the player starts the activity, they are spawned in the back of a plane. They then need to walk up to the back of the plane and jump off - in real life this means actually walking over and stepping off. They then use press the parachute button on the controller and need to use the controls to move themselves in mid air. The intent is for the user to try and land on a target - the closer to the center of the target, the more points they got.
I coordinated and worked with a multimedia team member to record and implement 360 videos into the application. We travelled to multiple locations, including the halifax harbour as well as Gagetown, to record exercises and events.
Implementation of the 360 videos was done by creating a panaramic shaded sphere with a render texture that rendered the video. The challenge was lowering the video size to an acceptable level without compromising quality as each video could be upwards of 1GB or larger.
Controls were managed by the same menu system that is used throughout the application. Users would press a button on the controller and select options via a world-space UI.
I created the UI interface and design throughout the Virtual Recruiting Centre application. This went through a few interations as we explored different options. The final design included two parts: The UI that would be attached to the players hand and the world-space elements.
The first portion, the player hand menu, is a contextual menu that would change based on what scene the player is in. If they are in an environmental scene(Navy, Airforce, Army), then they would be presented with all of the activities they could go to. If they were participating in an acitivity, such as watching 360 videos or skydiving, then they would be given options to leave the scene. This same menu acted as a video player for the interactive video panels around the environments. To create these, Unity prefab variants were used which were changed based on the context of the scene.
The second portion, world-space UI, involved creating interactive elements on world elements and objects. The challenge here was designing these objects in a way that encouraged and taught users to interact with the element. The final solution was a flashing graphical element that showed the users the steps to interact with the object. This graphic was reused throughout the application to represent any object you could interact with. As users were relatively uncomfortable with VR, it had to be clear what you needed to do to interact with the environment.