Ahhaa 4D Virtual Reality Cinema
Murad Magomedkerimov, Thomas-Bairam Toodo
Final Report
Our project is making a virtual reality experience for Ahhaa 4D cinema. Project is done with Unreal Engine 4. Our project consists of several parts:
- Plugin for UE4 to write necessary information to textfile.
- Calculating character acceleration.
- Communicating with Ahhaa 4D cinema equipment(moving chair etc).
- Making models, animations and textures.
- Putting the whole thing together.
We have been working with the first two points. We also have other members in our little workgroup, including Ats and a couple of students from art school and psychology students. So our project right now is basically UE4 example third person shooter project with additions. Most of the additions are in /Content/ThirdPersonBP/Blueprints/ThirdPersonCharacter.uasset blueprint. Here are some parts of this blueprint:
Calculating acceleration.
Writing to file.
FileIO method in C++ which is found in /Source/Ahhaa4D folder.
In-game screenshot - rectangular shape above the character head is moving when he accelerates. Also, we can see the acceleration values in text form.
Screenshot of the demo. One of the points of changing the setting was that, this should eliminate extreme values when calculating acceleration, since they came about when gravity affects the object and also since other members of our team already made a demo with troll-like giant, we wanted to do something different. Unfortunately this brought more unexpected problems - acceleration is now always 0 which is probably due to automatic movement of the actor(with the matinee animation editor). For the demo we created a skybox to create "outerspace". At first we tried to add movement with spline, but then got advice to try Manitee editor instead, which was a lot more suitable for us. We also added spaceship(main actor) mesh for the demo.
Improvements
We grew more used to working with UE4. More specifically using C++ classes and blueprints in UE4. Also creating models made us more proficent at using software with some nifty tricks that were not introduced during the course.
Issues
The main issue we had during the project are still not resolved - how to get reliable information to control the motion platform in the cinema and give it valid input. We made numerous attempts to get data just right and always found something lacking. We probably will continue to work on the project even after this course as the amount of work that is required to finish the project exceedes the requirement for this course.
Project is available - https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4_pauekuo8FRGprQ2ktMFpwUXM/view?usp=sharing. We had a lot of help from Ats Kurvet - some of the code is his creation. Project is compiled with Unreal Engine 4.10 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2015.