Cubic Austin XR (Virtual & Augmented Reality) Showcase
Role: Conceptual design, world design, technical scripting, creative leadership, customer coordination
Team: Gameplay Engineer, Technical Designer, Project Manager, Graphic Designer, 3D Artist
In late 2015, Cubic Austin was asked to provide a testbed for a DARPA program called RAM Replay. RAM Replay was an investigation of the brain’s ability to recall information that might be associated with an audio cue, particularly if that audio cue was played during sleep. This research was based on extensive studies of rats finding their way around mazes, so the scientists who were doing the research wanted to prove the same with humans. So, we settled on making a detailed virtual city where human participants would find their way around just like in the real world.
Our first iteration created a beautifully rendered city that we were able to get up and running in a matter of days; however, while it looked like a real US-based city, it wasn’t quite what the scientists that we were working with needed. They needed an environment that allowed them to test efficient and non-efficient paths through the city streets, so we went back to the drawing board and created a layout that was a maze first and a city second. This was much better for producing meaningful results for the project, especially after we started to explore using the Oculus DK2 headset so that the city would be in fully immersive VR. Since you could easily move your head to look around, it meant that we could do more to create a more lifelike city environment, such as having large landmarks tower in the background to help “triangulate” where you were.
During the development of RAM Replay, HTC and Valve Software released the HTC Vive headset - this new hardware, with its improved resolution and body tracking technology, was a revelation to us and the participants in this program. Until it was resolved with the HTC Vive, motion sickness in VR had been a big problem even with veteran developers who worked on 3D video games for years. HTC Vive tracks your head motions so that your inner ear and eyes don’t get out of sync and cause motion sickness.
RAM Replay was completed in the summer of 2018 and included configurable destinations and goals, autonomous pedestrians, and a suite of analysis tools that allowed neuroscientists to sync data by timestamp between the simulation and their equipment.