Feb 272017
 


This was a fun project I created over a couple of evenings. The idea was to create a room with four walls that looked into different worlds. I wanted to be able to walk into those worlds and come back. It went pretty well.

In this scene you see summer, winter, fall, and sky. There are butterflies in the summer, crows in the winter, leaves in the fall, and the open sky has seagulls. From the center of any room you can peer out into all four worlds. If you step into a world, you can explore it as immersive space. It is only when you walk around to the backside of a wall you will notice there is no wall present and the illusion of an open room is maintained.

I did find that having all thirteen stereo camera’s active in the scene could take a toll on frame rate. I played with it a little bit more and optimized it in order to only have four camera’s on at any given time. Why four? One stereo camera was needed for the player. That is the ‘eyes’ you (as a player) look through in the scene. The other three are for the corresponding walls looking into those worlds. Each wall acted as a 3d screen you could look into. Each screen’s display is from a stereo camera located in the other world. Each stereo camera move’s just like the player in all four worlds at the same time. It look’s better as long as I don’t go too crazy with particle effects. Optimizing to four active camera’s was much better then the original thirteen since the extra nine stereo cameras were not visible.

Feb 272017
 

This is a test scene created in Unity. It is using HTC’s Stereo Renderer to create portals. It is created for the HTC Vive, but would also work on an Oculus.

In this test scene I have created four platforms. Each is a different color. Each has one shape. On each of the platforms there are three walls. They look through to their corresponding wall on each of the other platforms. When you stand in the center of a room, you can turn your head around and see all four shapes.