Humble Abodes

Humble Abodes Group!

Inspiration

During our drive from Arizona, we started looking at what kind of equipment would be at SD Hacks and saw that the HTC Vive would be present. Our excitement towards SD Hacks was heightened so much so that we watched tutorials the whole 6 hour drive. One of our team members is the Vice President of the Game Development organization and is starting the initiative of bringing this kind of technology to Arizona State University. We began to think of all the possibilities there are to utilizing the HTC Vive. Then an even greater idea inspired moreso to win. Imagine the possibilities and influence that bringing the ASU Game Development club an HTC Vive would have. This would significantly help build the interest of ASU students in newer technologies and innovation.

What it does

Humble Abodes is a creative interior design application that enables you to fully decorate and customize your home to scale. Users are able to try different furniture configurations without the heavy lifting, transportation, or worry of unfulfilled design aspirations. Utilizing the HTC Vive, Humble Abodes gives users the freedom to create the home of their dreams. Before beginning, there are a few control features we would like the user to be aware about. In order to move around the house, simply click and point the track pad button in the location you would like to be. Anything mounted on the walls with the exception of the refrigerator cannot be moved. Point the track controller towards the item you wish to pick up, click the track control, and hold the side button simultaneously to carry and hold items. In order to add items into the room, click the track controller and bottom button towards the picture of the item you wish to add. Lastly, to delete items from your home, pick up the item and throw it over the side of the house without letting go of the track control. We hope you have a wonderful experience. VR pleased to serve you.

How we built it

We built our project using unity with C# scripts. None of the members in our group has ever had experience with virtual reality before, so we spent a good amount of time, at the beginning, playing with different Vive demos figuring out what we were capable of. We, then, found different templates on the asset store and started coding.

Challenges we ran into

Our two biggest challenges were that only one person could test (and to some extent code) at the same time and that we were all inexperienced with virtual reality. With the two of those combined, it was really difficult to distribute a lot of the coding workload between team members and when we tried to learn how to do new things, it took a lot of tweaking and testing for only one or two people.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are so proud that we can now say we have built an application for the HTC Vive. None of us had ever worked with virtual reality before, and it was an amazing experience learning and building the application.

What we learned

We learned so much through this process. Half of our team had never used unity before, and half of our team had never used C# before. We learned so much about how to create a virtual reality application, how to test one, and that if you just can’t figure something out, just take a walk around the room because usually everything seems to solve itself after a good break.

What's next for Humble Abode

With high hopes of winning the HTC Vive, we plan on sharing this technology with the Game Development club where students will be able to utilize and innovate creative, future applications. By allowing other ASU students access, the HTC Vive will be put to greater use than just our team. Our hope is that the ASU campus will be able to create a VR club similar to UCSD.