Inspiration
VR can be a pretty isolating experience. One of our teammates owns an Oculus headset and whenever he's using it, no-one else had much to do other than watch the person flail around in empty space. This gave us the idea that there should be more VR games that involve people other than just the player.
What it does
It causes events in a demo VR game by receiving texts in real time through twilio. Imagine watching a streamer play though a game, and being able to make an enemy appear or cause a random event by messaging in!
How we built it
We used Standard Library to get text messages from twilio and store them in Airtable. We also set a couple web hooks in Stdlib in order to get entries from Airtable. We developed a simple VR maze using Unity. We wrote scripts that fetched data from Airtable by sending a get request to the correct Stdlib endpoint, which then depending on the texts triggered different events. The Unity App was built on top of the Oculus SDK and can be side loaded directly Into a mobile Oculus Quest.
Challenges we ran into
We wanted to do this project with Twitch comments in place of the texting system, which would make much more sense in this context. But Standard Library doesn't have that functionality yet.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to build a VR app where things happened based what someone texted without having ever used Unity or Standard Library. Small things like making a sphere move or making an object appear in response to a text were big accomplishments for us. And the big thing: This was built in about 13 hours...
What we learned
Contrary to popular belief, you CAN sleep at hackathons.
What's next for Crowdsourcing VR
As support for Twitch comments is added in Standard Library, this will become much more functional in terms of real world usage. The logic for handling commands will have to improve considerably to allow a large number of people to participate. This can also be a possible revenue stream for streamers - they give users who pay money more control of the game.
The game we used was just to present proof of concept. In practice, this can be integrated into existing games like minecraft and standalone games with this core concept can be created.
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