Inspiration
Current VR is great for vision and audio, but it’s really missing the other senses – touch, smell, and most importantly, taste. We aimed to create a richer interactive experience by incorporating real-world food and drink into the VR experience.
What it does
SommeliAR is a mixed-reality wine tasting experience. As you sip a variety of wines in real-life, our application transports you around the world to experience the sights and sounds of each wine's homeland. At the same time, a virtual menu gives you high-quality sommelier analyses of the wines.
How we built it
We attached a Leap Motion to the front of an Oculus Rift in order to allow users to both visually see a scene, as well as use their hands to interact with it. We used Unity to developed 3 scenes for our user experience. We used free assets on the Unity asset store to compile scenes together, as well as create some of our own custom assets via Maya. We used free online audio files for sound effects/ambient music. We programmed in C# to create scripts that allowed transition between scenes, hand interaction with virtual items, head-up displays, sound effects, and other important aspects of the user experience. We mapped real world positions to virtual space to be able to allow interaction with the real world.
Challenges we ran into
The hardest part of this hack was getting our hand controllers, which facilitated by attaching a Leap Motion to the front plate of our Oculus headset. Figuring out how to match objects in both physical and virtual space, such as creating a parallel between virtual and physical desks/glasses, so that the user’s exact hand motions are able to interact with virtual objects with little to no errors proved expressly challenging.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We’re proud of the visual quality of our Unity scenes, our foray into logo design, and some of our “creative” solutions to particular coding problems we ran into during this hack.
What we learned
We had to quickly become familiarized with the Leap Motion API, and while we now have a pretty strong base with this tech there is still much more that we could learn about. While most of us have had experience with the HTC Vive headset, learning how to develop for the Oculus posed its own surmountable challenges.
What's next for SommeliAR
- Gradually automate the jobs of all real-world sommeliers.
- ???
- General AI.
- World domination.
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