Cubic Austin XR (Virtual & Augmented Reality) Showcase

ROLE: Design Director / Product Design, customer management
TEAM: 1x Gameplay Engineer, 1x Technical Designer, 1x Project Manager, 1x UX Designer, 1x 3D Artist
PROJECT LENGTH: Thirty-Six Months

RAM Replay

In late 2015, Cubic Austin was tasked with providing 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 navigating mazes, so the scientists conducting the research sought to apply the same principle to humans. We settled on creating a detailed virtual city where human participants would navigate their way around, just as they would 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, although it resembled a real US-based city, it wasn’t quite what the scientists we were working with needed. They needed an environment that allowed them to test efficient and inefficient 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 approach proved to be much more effective in producing meaningful results for the project, especially after we began exploring the use of the Oculus DK2 headset, which would enable the city to be fully immersed in virtual reality. 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” your location.

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 significant problem, even for veteran developers who had 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. It 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.