Space Base VR is a room-filling virtual reality experience that was developed within two project weeks for an exhibition at University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. The experience is based on a workshop room for which several teams created different scenarios to transform the space into a fictional parallel world.
A university project by: Sabrina Hartwig, Hannah Weigand, Benjamin Kaczynski, Milan Wulf
In the beginning, we all had many individual ideas and approaches, but then rather quickly agreed that our scenario should be a space station. A large part of the work consisted of modeling the necessary objects and designing the base in Blender, particularly paying attention to the real dimensions of the workshop room.
Besides modeling, my main task was to program the various interactions in Unity using C#. Due to the limited hardware specification of the Meta Quest 2 headset, it was especially important to optimize the performance. Sebastian Wloch, who organized the project weeks together with Tim Ebert, developed a clever technique to align the virtual and real space by virtually placing two connected points on fixed points in the real space.
The project was a good opportunity to continue working on my Unity and programming skills, developing something based on a physical room was new to me. What I find particularly interesting about roomscale VR is how naturally you can move through real space without actually seeing it. The physical boundaries of the real world bring an additional level of immersion, but of course also bring some challenges, in our case for example we had to make sure that several visitors do not collide. The project has definitely encouraged me to further specialize in VR.
