Upon receiving my project last Wednesday (2/3/2021), I instantly felt heaps of excitement! I recently got into Virtual Reality gaming when I bought the original Oculus Rift (CV1) off of my friend Rick. This was last semester, Fall of 2020. Most of my VR time has been spent playing a game called Beat Saber, which is similar to what the requirements of my project are asking of me. Since I enjoy Beat Saber so much, I am quite eager to make a game similar to it. I have no experience with any game engine, so I am also eager to learn how to make video games in general. The component of this project that makes me anxious is automatically determining the beat of user submitted songs. This has been done in numerous different ways and there are supposedly algorithms that do this, but my main concern is incorporating this into the game (i.e. adjusting how fast/slow things happen). Either way I am ready to be challenged! As suggested by McVey, I have decided to use Unity as my platform. So far, I have successfully created a 3D game project within Unity in which my VR headset and controllers are recognized. Within this project I created a basic, large room that the user spawns into. The Oculus Rift HMD (head-mounted display) is the main camera and the two controllers successfully connect as well. 3D models of the controllers used show up in game wherever the user has their hands in real life. These controller models are a part of the Unity Oculus Integration kit. In the future I plan on replacing them with a boxing glove model, as I have named my game BeatBox and plan on having the user punch blocks as they approach them.
So…to summarize, so far I have an empty room you can spawn into while wearing the headset and the controllers. My next objective is to create an object that moves towards the player and figure out how to test for collision with the player’s hand.
