Project4S18
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Homework Assignment 4: Social VR
Update: Watch the videos of this year's course here.
For this project you need to implement a two user 3D VR application for two Oculus Rifts with Touch controllers. For inspiration for this project you can use the Oculus Toy Box application.
For this assignment you can obtain 100 points, plus up to 10 points for extra credit.
This homework assignment is due on Tuesday, June 12th at 3:00pm.
The project is designed to be a team project for two people. You can team up with the same person as for project 1, or a different one.
Application Requirements
The following requirements apply to your application. Each item gets you 10% of your technical score.
- Your application needs to be a dual user application running on two Oculus Rifts with Touch controllers, attached to two separate computers.
- The two users need to be located in the same VR space, which requires network communication between the two computers the Rifts are attached to.
- Your application needs to use full 6 degree of freedom head tracking.
- The users need to work together on something, for example: hand an object to the other user, play 3D Pong, play chess, build something with Legos, cook together, etc.
- Collision detection needs to be part of the interaction algorithm. It can be simply done by proximity, or bounding box collisions.
- Each user needs to be able to use at least one of their Touch controllers to do something with it.
- Either head positions or the positions of the interacting hand(s) of each user need to be indicated with at least a simple piece of geometry for both users (e.g., a cube), to represent the user to the other one. The representations of head and/or hands need to be distinguishable from one another. The representation of the head needs to have an indicator for the direction the user is looking in, hands can't be rotationally symmetrical (i.e., can't be represented as spheres).
- The application needs to run fluidly and without judder in the HMDs, i.e., at 90 fps.
- You need to use audio in your application, e.g., for background music, sound effects, etc. It doesn't have to be spatialized, unless you want to compete for the extra credit for audio.
- At least one 3D object in your application needs to be custom made by your team. You can use photogrammetry (with Agisoft Photoscan or other tools such as 123D Catch), or a 3D scanner such as the one in the VR lab.
Useful Tips
You are allowed to use any software libraries which you used in homework assignments 1 through 3. In addition, you are allowed to use the following libraries:
- SOIL to load texture images, or any other library listed here
- The Oculus Avatar SDK
- Assimp for importing OBJs
- Very simple, single header file solution to load images.
- Tiny OBJ Loader to load OBJ files.
- SDL, to replace GLFW
- OpenAL for audio support
- XML parsers, such as MiniXML or PugiXML - useful for configuration files
- Physics engines PhysX or Bullet.
You are allowed to use any source for 3D models and textures, including:
To create your own models, here a few tips:
- The 3D scanner at the Vive computer in the VR lab is a scanner from Matter and Form. It scans objects up to a size of 9.8 inches high, 7.0 inches in diameter, and a weight of 6lbs. The scanning software is installed on the computer. We recommend to export the scans to the OBJ file format to process with MeshLab or load into your application directly.
- Agisoft Photoscan offers free 30 day trial licenses. You do have to register your email address to get one, but they are legit.
- An open source alternative to Photoscan is WebODM. UCSD has a research compute cluster that you can use to process your images into a 3D model. The images need to be taken of a static scene (no lighting or shadow changes while you take the images), best to put the object outside in a shaded area. Take 30-100 images from all sides. Log in to the WebODM front end with the account credentials given on Piazza. Create a project, click Select Images and upload your images. The default settings should get you a reasonable 3D reconstruction that you can download in its textured format for the best quality.
If your 3D models are too big to render at 90 fps, try using MeshLab to reduce the polygon count of your models.
To communicate between the two Rift PCs, you will need to implement network communication. You can keep this very simple. You are allowed to use any network communication library, including cloud services, data bases, or anything related. We recommend using direct socket communication, as described in this example, and the code can be downloaded here. Another approach, which is more elegant but not as easy to debug is to use a remote procedure call (RPC) library such as this one. You can choose to create a server program which both applications connect to, or have each application connect directly to the other. In the latter case you should run your network communication in a separate thread so that the rendering loop cannot get interrupted, which would likely lead to the frame rate dropping below 90 fps.
Like for the other homework projects, the tutors will hold office hours for you to get help with your projects, including to brainstorm ideas for your application.
Rift Access
For this project, every student has a dedicated Oculus Rift HMD, so that teams of two will have two dedicated units available to them. We will also have a limited number of shared Rift units for those who need to do this project without a partner, so that they have a second Rift available. Please let the instructor know if you need access to the pool of shared Rifts.
You are allowed to use the HTC Vive in the VR lab instead of a second Rift. However, because we only have one of those, in case that multiple people want to use it you need to come up with a sharing schedule.
If you have access to other 6 DOF VR HMDs with one or two 6 DOF controllers you are allowed to one or two of these to substitute the Rifts. If you choose to do this, make sure that you can bring your devices to demonstrate your project in the VR lab on the due date in finals week.
Grading
Your final project score consists of three parts:
- Documentation (10 points)
- Application (90 points)
- Extra Credit (10 points)
Documentation (10 Points)
You need to create a blog to report on the progress you're making on your project. You need to make at least two blog entries to get the full score. The first is due on Monday, June 4th at 12 noon, the second is due on Monday, June 11th at 12 noon.
The first blog entry needs to contain (at a minimum) the following pieces of information:
- The name of your project (you need to come up with one)
- The names of your team members
- A short description of the project
- One or more screen shots of your application in its current state
In week 2 you need to write about the progress you made and update on any changes you made to team or team name. You also need to post another screen shot.
You are free to create the blog on any web based blog site, such as Blogger or WordPress. You should use the same blog each time and just add new blog entries. You are free to add more entries than the two required ones.
Each team also needs to make an up to 3 minutes long Youtube video of their application, to show during the first hour of the grading event during finals week. We are going to create a Youtube playlist to which we are going to ask you to add your video. This video is due by June 12th at 12 noon.
The points are distributed like this:
- Blog entry #1: 3 points
- Blog entry #2: 3 points
- Video: 4 points
VR Application (90 Points)
The final project has to be presented to the course staff during our final exam slot on Tuesday, June 12th. The presentations start off with a video screening session at 3pm in room 1242. Then we will do science fair-style demos in VR lab B210 in two grading windows: one from 4-5pm, the other from 5-6pm. You are allowed to bring friends to both video screening and demos.
The points for your project demonstration will be distributed as follows:
- Technical quality: 75% (strictly based on your programming)
- VR Experience: 25% (subjective score factoring in your project idea, aesthetics, usability, wow factor, etc.)
The scores will be determined by the graders, which are instructor and tutors. You need to be prepared to let the graders try out your application during your grading window.
Extra Credit (10 Points max.)
We created a number of categories for which we might offer extra credit. There will be 5 points of extra credit for each category a project wins, for a maximum of 10 extra credit points total. It is possible for multiple teams to tie in a category, in which case each team gets 5 extra credit points.
If a team wants extra credit we encourage them to tell us in their blog which categories they want to compete in and why. But even if you don't tell us that you're competing we might nominate you for one or more categories anyways.
The categories are:
- Best video (the one you make for the video screening): nicely edited video that shows live footage of both users using the application, along with what they see in the Rift, and it needs to include audio
- Best app to make use of dual users (ie, requires two users, not very well usable with single user)
- Best non-game app (i.e., art, medical, engineering, education)
- Best game app
- Most intuitive controls (can include in-app training etc)
- Best user interaction concept
- Best aesthetics
- Most technically challenging app
- Best use of audio
- Judges' favorite
