[S12] - Never Dine Alone

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  Interact with other people

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  Mixed Reality for accessing your food

Inspiration

Experience unique places from times past, present or future. Combat loneliness. Enjoy your daily routines in the company of people your care about or get to know new ones.

What it does

Creates a virtual dining space in which to enjoy your physical meal. Matches people into the room based on preferences. (group sizes; friends/strangers; etc...)

How we built it

Tools used

• Unity - application
• After Effects - promotional video
• Blender - dining room model
• Audacity - audio editing
• Handbrake - video transcoding
• Smart Normal Map - normal map creation

Unity addons used

• Meta Presence Platform

Challenges we ran into

Creating the multiuser experience within the time constrains. Some struggles with Unity inconsistent behavior and slow/buggy development cycle despite using Link. Some bugs in Meta Presence Platform such as the telemetry consent popup.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The concept maps very well to a mixed reality experience and has the potential to also greatly benefit from many of the building blocks of the Meta Presence Platform.

What we learned

To create a mixed reality experience. Time management and attending our first ever hackathon.

What's next for Never Dine Alone

• Implement the "multi-player" interaction.
  • Matching filtering (friends/strangers).
  • Live Meta Avatars.
  • Voice channel.
  • 3D positional audio.
• Multiple diverse rooms/environments.
• Interaction with the environment by manipulating 3D objects in the scene.
• Hand tracking.
• Add virtual host to for instance introduce the guest at the "table".
• Virtual host makes private suggestions of ice-breakers to individuals during the course of the meal. Possibly powered by context aware AI.
• Add AI powered identification and generation of 3D models for each participant meal.

Built With

• audacity
• blender
• oculus
• unity