Inspiration; We want to test the boundaries of Virtual Reality and real life. We want to know if you can immerse yourself so strongly in a Virtual environment that your sensory perception is affected. Can you _ feel _ the wind from the virtual environment? Ask yourself if you have goosebumps because of how cold the weather is...virtually? We're going to show you ** what the world is feeling. **
What it does; Project HappyMedia interacts with the user on a web application that accesses information about what the world is _ currently _ feeling. On the backend, it is moved into a Database (using Mongodb) and the most current (today's) rating is recalled. It then simulates the feelings of the world into a virtual world using Unity. We create a mood sensitive environment through landforms, weather, time of day, etc. The viewer doesn't get to know the mood of the world until they put on the Oculus and feel the mood of the world. Our Oculus simulation currently runs separate to the web application because we had no access to an Oculus and wouldn't be able to test the functionality of the front end web application if it ran straight to the Oculus.
How I built it; The Oculus environments were built in Unity using Oculus and Unity APIs. The Front end was built using Sublime as a text editor and using MongoDB and Node.js. The API we used to get the global happiness takes people's input all across the world and it updates with respect to the timezones (it updates more than once a day). It is built for mood tracking across the globe. The API also gives us information about the global rate of happiness. For our use of it, it also does update as the happiness factor goes up and down throughout the day.
Challenges I ran into; We ran into a lot of challenges with the database (getting values OUT of the database using indexing in particular). We really wished that MongoDB had a representative that could have assisted us because it seemed like there were some small issues in which we couldn't get enough community support and help with on the internet but they could have quickly resolved. Of course, we cannot reiterate enough how hard it is to try to develop for hardware without having it to debug and test. We were really really interested in using it from the beginning which is why we persisted with the project regardless and we hope it doesn't affect the judging too much that we are not able to provide a full on demo.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of; Every single team member worked with technology and software that was challenging for them as well as our project was definitely challenging for us from the beginning. We knew that it would have been logical to do a web app OR an Oculus simulation and that linking them was going to be very tricky, however, we were passionate that our idea was extremely worthwhile and any progress we make could later be improved and updated. It's definitely an idea that we are proud to work on and want to continue to see through to the finish.
What I learned; We all learned an incredible amount from what we worked with in our separate tasks; Unity, Mongo, Node.js, etc. We also learned a lot about modularizing, not really self motivated but simply because we couldn't build the project seamlessly to work from start to finish without the Oculus. Therefore we had to separate it in a manner that could be stitched together easily at a later date. We definitely learned a lot from the talks and workshops along the way and I think that is a large reason we were so motivated not to give up on the two tasks that are independent of eachother but really do go together to make a set. Simply creating an Oculus Rift/Unity world simulation has been done before. It lacks creativity and purpose and mostly makes use of Unity's terrain builder. On the other hand, a Web app simply returning the happiness rating of the world currently is definitely cool, but how long before you forget about it and never use it? It would make almost no impression whatsoever on the user. It could be as forsaken as checking the weather. Together it stimulates interest, curiosity and mystery about the boundaries of Virtual Reality and human connectivity.
What's next for HappyMedia; We hope to impress the judges with our application of the Oculus Rift API enough to get the DK2 prizes and with that continue to implement our ideas for this. The amount we have done in one weekend on this project is huge, monumental in fact, and if we can work on things at even half the pace we are going to be beta testing in no time. We have high hopes to get something testable by the end of this year and hopefully get some more Unity/Oculus worlds developed as well.
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