VO: Week 2

The second week of the project was centered around development. The summary is split into the categories social, concept and development to provide you with an easy to follow update.

Social

• Discovered Discord: I found out that in the realm of AR and VR multiple Discord communities exist. I joined some. However, I did not do too much exploring yet. Therefore it‘s too early to tell what might be worth a look.
• Tried to work with Slack: I tried discovering spaces on Slack too.
• Read more and more on the Babylon.js forum: The Babylon.js forum seems to be a neat place to ask questions and read about all different aspects of the project. They have a nice intro using a chatbot too.
• Discovered https://threedium.com/: A great demo showcasing what‘s possible using Babylon.js.
• Discovered High Fidelity: A great software featuring a 2D map with spatial audio. It is done really well.

Concept

• Chose VO as the go-to-name for the project.

Development

• Created an office building procedurally: The office scene now consists of a building with stories with floor, ceiling, facade, windows and walls – both glass walls and solid walls. It consists of meshes that are generated at runtime.
• Modified camera and input controls for smooth navigation on a laptop: The camera is now a first person camera that allows navigation using the arrow keys.
• Experimented with a Node.js server, https://punkoffice.com/3d_multiplayer_games: The creator of Threedium published a tutorial outlining the necessary structures for having multiple persons in one scene. The structure of his code varied strongly from the structure of my code. However, the basic ideas of authentication and updating on camera transformation along with the sleek Node.js server were very helpful.
• Deployed to Heroku: To get everything up and running, both server and client were deployed to Heroku.
• Added voice chat using Peer.js: Peer.js is a library that allows easy brokering between so-called peers, for e.g. voice chat.

Conclusion

Having an actual office scene, multiple players in it with a voice chat enhanced the experience significantly. However, there is very much left to do. First of all, all aspects that currently work in a minimal version have to be upgraded heavily. Secondly, new features which are only possible in a virtual office need to be introduced.