WoaW Week 2 – Learning Unreal

Test Scene

I didn’t make anything fancy for my test scene, just wanted to try out a few features and build a passable environment. Here she is. It’s a tower based on the design of the Sephiroth.

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The Lab

I think the lab really showcases the Vive’s capabilities. Whether because of my past nerdy childhood love of archery or because it’s just so damn well designed the bow and arrow is the standout interaction for me. That and blowing up balloons in the vive demo are still two of the most convincing touch based vr interactions I’ve experienced so far and in my mind also show off how versatile the vive controller is. The robo dog is also a nice touch, you want to pet him in my  experience. I really like the range of interactions. I had played the lab briefly but only got to try the main area and the secret shop. From a non gamey perspective the model of the 3D human body was something that I hadn’t seen before and was impressed with the fidelity of and how they managed scanning through it with the controllers.

As a showcase it’s really great. One thing of note is Valve really worked around the vive’s limitations (useable space) with the design of the environments, while it errs on the side of caution you’re rarely frustrated as where and where you can’t move to is fairly well demarcated. One shortage I could think of is that without knowing the vocabulary of VR or how the controllers work knowing what to do and how you can interact with the environment can be a bit unclear. I remember the first time I used the bow for example that someone had to tell me to just pull the string back, seems obvious but there’s very little instruction. I think they over relied on the “intuitive” nature of the interactions having real world analogues a bit too much.