Tarique Naseem

The Innovative Technologies Centre, the people behind the Wow Academy, approached me to develop a VR demonstrator that they could show off to their funding partners, which include Yorkshire Forward and the LSE. It was to be used as part of an overall demonstration to secure further funding for future projects.

After discussions with the client on the project specification, it was decided to base the demo on the Apollo 11 lunar landing, utilising immersive VR technology. This particular theme was chosen as it would be the first project to be fully developed should funding be secured.

The major challenge with the project was the tight time constraints imposed (3 weeks!). Within this time period I had to develop a basic game engine, create the 3D assets, and add in hardware support for various VR peripherals, amongst other tasks - A tall order for any developer!

Various open-source SDK’s were utilised in the development of the game engine, including the Ogre3D graphics SDK, the ODE physics library and the OpenAL audio API.

For the assets I decided to scour Turbosquid for suitable 3D models, and found a highly detailed pack designed by the excellent PerspectX. However, these high resolution models had to be converted for real-time use, as they were originally created for pre-rendered scenes. There was quite a bit of work with this alone, as it required polygon reduction and the re-working of the materials, utilising pixel and vertex shaders.

After 3 weeks of (very) hard work, the project was completed on time and budget. The client was delighted with the results, especially considering the short time scale. I celebrated by having a full nights sleep… and then some :)

You can view more screenshots of the project in the portfolio section.

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