VR Disc Trotters

Inspiration

The need to travel constantly is a desire that fills many. As students we often lack both the time and money to see the sights we want to see. We thought that an application that would allow you to magically transport yourself anywhere around the world to see its 3D full scale visualization in simulation would be the next best thing.

What it does

Users put on the Oculus Rift and find themselves near Central-Park in New-York. They can choose to explore the city, teleport to Montreal, Mount Everest, The Grand Canyon through a single click on their controller, or they can input any location through a keyboard interface to find themselves soaring through new sights.

How we built it

We utilized the Unity Game Engine for all the scripting and visualization of 3D data as well as to set up the Oculus Rift development environment. We used the MapBox SDK to acquire 3D map data of real world locations to be streamed in real time.

Challenges we ran into

The SDK's documentation is somewhat lacking and it was found to have several insurmountable bugs that forced us to consider alternative solutions when the SDK should have been able to provide simple ones. The most notable bug we had involved the entire world freezing whenever the user decided to look down at their feet.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our app allows us to virtually navigate throughout the entire world. We initially thought we'd only manage to create a geo-fenced prototype in a single city, but ended up with an application that can stream in the terrain from anywhere around the world.

What we learned

Data visualization can take the mundane and give you a perspective that you never thought you could see. The advent of Virtual Reality is bringing about new ways to explore data in 3D. Sleep deprivation and 5 hour-long one-line bugs are still as annoying on your 3198th hackathon as on your first.

What's next for VR Disc Trotters

We'd like to see how much further we can take this project. It would be awesome if we could further optimize the tile loading such that terrain would be generated for as far as the eye can see. Next we have a few other features we'd like to explore to make the project more immersive:

Adding voice recognition to allow users to say where they want to be out loud
Playing local music when a player teleports to a new country
Adding a dynamic skybox that incorporates real-time weather patterns from the current locale.
Live traffic view when in a city
Adding a night time skybox with an accurate constellation map