VR Nature Hiking

Inspiration

VR Hiking Trails

The project leverages the capability of world model generation from world labs and natural locomotion by feet with Foottroller (foottroller.com) to create a truly immersive nature hiking experience in VR.

What it does

The VR application allows players to naturally walk on a trail surrounded by beautiful plants and flowers in VR.

How we built it

We used Marble from World Labs to generate segments of a trail via prompts and then assembled them in Marble Studio. The generated Gaussian splatting model is downloaded as a ply file.

The Gaussian splatting file in loaded into a unity scene to create the environment.

To complete the experience, we integrated Foottroller for movement control. (foottroller.com) Foottroller is a specialized controller designed for natural VR locomotion and foot-based game control.

In our project, Foottroller completely replaces the thumbstick, allowing players to walk naturally through the environment. Users can adjust their movement speed based on their stepping frequency, making it easy to view scenery or turn around.

Additionally, we decoupled the movement direction from the player's looking direction. This allows players to look around freely while moving without affecting their path, closely mimicking a real-world hiking experience.

Challenges we ran into

Models generated by world labs’s marble have short usable sections. To create a continuous trail, we have to generate the trail by segments, trim and stitch the segment together. Fortunately Marble studio has all the editing functions available. Once familiar with the studio the editing process is smooth and efficient.

It is difficult to run Gaussian splatting scene with a large number of points. The Gaussian splatting rendering is not optimized. Game performance issue will occur when the number of points increase. We optimized the scene by reducing the number of splatting points to make the game work on PC, pico, and pico emulator.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made a beautiful natural trail with world model. The game delivers a new experience in VR that is refreshing, immersive and quite enjoyable.

What we learned

World models have significantly simplified the creation of high-quality virtual environments. When combined with Footroller’s solution for natural movement control, these technologies enable truly immersive VR experiences.

What's next for Trails

Current rendering of Gaussian splatting scenes on PC and VR headsets are not efficient. Ideally the rendering speed should not directly related to the total number of points by only the number of points in the player’s view. Solving this problem would allow large Gaussian splatting scenes possible to create immersive and interesting VR experiences.

Many new elements can also be added to the nature hiking experience including adding culture or story related environments, adding AI interactions, dynamic creation and expansion of scenes, making realistic scenes based of sites in the real world.

Built With

• foottroller
• marble
• picoemulator
• unity
• worldlabs