Metaverse Campfire

Inspiration

During these last few years of unprecedented chaos, strife and isolation, more and more people have turned to tech for an escape. Looking to do a VR hack, and inspired by the hackathon theme of "Campfire", we decided to harness the serene feeling of sitting by a campfire in the woods in an attempt to replicate that feeling in virtual reality.

What it does

Our hack immediately immerses the player in a custom-built lake-side environment at nighttime, allowing them to wander around their campsite, relaxing under the vast night sky. The player can interact with marshmallow roasting sticks, which they pick up from a table in their campsite and use to pick up marshmallows. The player can then walk over to the campfire and roast the marshmallow as darkly as they want until it eventually catches on fire.

How we built it

We built our hack using Unreal Engine 5 and a PICO 4 VR headset. We built the camp scene and implemented logic to govern interaction with the environment. We created our own sound effects and music to increase environmental immersion. (Ambient sounds and models were not our own creations.)

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was getting the game to run on the VR headset. We had been attempting it to run as a native PICO 4 app, but after hours of experimentation and having discovered the technical limitations of UE5, we ultimately settled on using PC VR for our hack. Another large challenge was in familiarity with UE5: only one of our group members had had any experience using UE5, with all four of us needing to learn advanced UE5 techniques in a small period of time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of essentially teaching ourselves UE5 from scratch, and using it to develop something that stayed true to our initial vision of an immersive VR self-care environment. We are also proud of creating our own sound effects and music, all of which allowed us to cultivate the vibe we wanted to create with greater accuracy and precision.

What we learned

We learned a lot about collaborative programming in a different programming software, with the majority of our group having never worked in the world of computer graphics development. We also learned more about our capacity to break down a very complicated hack into smaller, incremental segments that could be compiled into something greater.

What's next for Metaverse Campfire

We hope to continue to expand functionality and the scope of the map, as well as the player's interactivity with the environment.

Built With

• unreal-engine