Virtual Reality Fly Mode
The VR fly mode gives the user total freedom on where they can navigate, meaning they can explore any part of the model in detail. Our UI allows users to seamlessly switch between whichever navigation mode they wish to use.
The direction of the right hand sets the user’s flight path whilst the right thumb stick sets the speed.
Keadby 3 Carbon Capture Power Station
This section showcases the interactive model our team created for SSE Thermal, a company who own a fleet of flexible generation and energy storage assets in the UK & I.
The model has different navigation modes for the user to explore the power station, including desktop and VR modes, which both have flying capabilities.
Desktop Fly Mode
The desktop fly mode gives the user total freedom on where they can navigate.
Desktop Mode
This clip showcases the desktop walking mode. Here you can see the teleportation arrows that invite users to climb ladders to otherwise restricted parts of the model.
Information points are distributed around the model and are displayed as rotating question marks. As the user navigates toward them, the blueprint functionality is triggered which plays a voice-over and initates the animation which displays the information text.
Also note how the information boards rotate to always align to be perpendicular with the user.
Minimap
The client requested a means for the user to know where they are in the model. I therefore made this translucent minimap by taking a still image from a camera within the scene, then instancing a green arrow that represented the user’s position on the aerial image.
The main challenge with this functionality was calibrating the arrow to always be in the correct position relative to the aerial image.
Processing Geometry
This is the raw geometry that me and my colleagues optimised; this formed the foundation of the interactive model.
See the Python script I wrote to help me optimise this geometry in Blender.
Ambient Sound
From my research and experiments I found these attenuation settings to be the most realistic for this particular scene.
Generally I chose very large falloff distances using a natural attenuation function to ensure the different sounds were blended together and could still be heard at long distances at a low volume.
This screen shot shows statistics for the instanced geometry level. With the viewport looking through the same camera, the frame rate is 13.18ms. Therefore in this specific circumstance instanced geometry outperformed the merged geometry.
Performance tests:
To decide if geometry should be instanced, or simply merged, I setup various experiments in Unreal Engine.
In this experiment I merged 12 sets of stairs together in one level, and instanced the same stairs in another level.
This image shows the statistics for the merged geometry level, with a frame rate of 18.83ms
