Posted on December 2, 2015

This simulation was developed as the final project for the Virtual Reality Systems course at Clemson University and won the best project demo award.

The simulation features a collaborative desktop VR puzzle solving game. Two players are put in a construction site environment where they collaboratively scale, rotate and translate objects to solve puzzles to progress to the next level.

The simulation uses 2 monitors and 2 sets of Razer Hydra controllers, one for each player. Each controller is represented in the simulation using a cone with a sphere at its tip. When a player touches an interactable object in the scene, the sphere lights up. The player can then scale, rotate or translate the object by pulling on the spherical edges of a 3D wireframe cube that shows up around the object, see Figure 2. The object can be manipulated collaboratively by pulling on different edges of the wireframe cube.

The biggest challenge was getting multiple Hydras to work simultaneously without networking as the Razer API only allows one Hydra basestation to be active at a time. To get around this problem, I kept swapping between the 2 hydras on every frame. Therefore, as long as the simulation was running at least at 60 frames per second, each Hydra controller functioned at 30 frames per second and provided a smooth interaction experience.