What is Snow Much Fun?
Snow Much Fun is a collaborative experience that mixes virtual reality and physical interaction, with the goal of having fun with virtual snow. I worked on this project in the second period of the autumn semester of 2022 in the course Advanced Graphics and Interaction at KTH. The virtual reality player can create snowballs of different sizes, throw the snow at objects, make snow sculptures, and draw in the snow. Audience members get a glimpse into the virtual world through a fixed screen and can change their viewpoint by moving and rotating a mobile phone. The VR player can see the audience member in the virtual world and vice versa. They can interact with each other by throwing snowballs at one another and the VR player can show the audience members their snow sculptures.
Development and Design
The development of Round Up took place from the middle of November 2022 until the middle of December 2022. I worked on the project with Guðrún Margrét Ívansdóttir, Hallbjörg Embla Sigtryggsdóttir, María Ómarsdóttir and Sindri Pétursson. The design brief for this project was to include participants in the experience we we making in some way. We wanted to make a virtual reality snow experience where one person was playing with snow in virtual reality and the audience could look into the experience and look around using a mobile phone. Almost like having a window into the virtual world. We were motivated in developing an immersive VR experience. We wanted to give people the opportunity to experience virtual snow and emulate the feeling of playing in real life snow. The snow simulation is a significant part of our experience, so we put emphasis on that aspect and kept the design of the environment simple.
The project was developed using Unity. The Oculus XR plugin was used for the virtual reality aspect. We used AR foundation for the mobile phone that the audience used to look into the virtual world. That allowed us to track the real world using the camera on the phone. For networking we utilized Mirror.
We split up different tasks between us and I was in charge of networking, and contributed to the VR game mechanics and gameplay. I worked on networking the different devices that were required for the game and made sure that everything was synched between the server and the clients. The VR game mechanics and gameplay included the interaction of snowballs and snowpiles and combining them together to increase their size. I also implemented the arms for the VR player.
I learned a lot during this whole project, especially how to work with virtual reality. I also learned a lot about network communication between different devices and how to make everything stay in sync between clients and server.