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Phoby!
Inspiration---
We wanted to build a VR app that could help people get over phobias. Our team members both suffer from a fear of heights, and one of us suffers from a fear of spiders. Game-likers that we are, and aware of the paradigm shift taking place in XR applications, we adapted VR technology to help users conquer their fears.
What it does---
Users enter into a virtual environment where they can experience various levels of intensity of exposure to the subjects of various phobias, including spiders and heights.
How we built it---
Austin built models in Blender and textured them in Unity. Ines assembled the back end in Unity. We utilized textures from Quixell for many of scenes, which was extremely helpful in establishing a realistic look in our models. Conversations we held prior to the Hackathon with Ryley Mancine, a researcher in Psychiatric Science at Michigan State University, were immensely helpful in providing the prior theoretical knowledge that informs our level design.
Challenges we ran into---
We wanted to incorporate a character that would lead the user through the experience, but it ended up taking so much time that we had to abandon it. We also found that the Quest automatically degrades textures far from the user in order to boost performance, which made it more difficult to optimize our models.
Accomplishments that we're proud of---
Points of pride on this project include having created nearly all of the models from scratch, texturing them ourselves, and having implemented a range of the quests features (including controller tracking and UI elements). We are also proud to have addressed a range of concerns in our app, including fear of heights, fear of spiders, and a meditation scene.
What we learned
We learned a great deal about backend programming in Unity and VR implementation, especially considering the sparse documentation that is available for the Quest.
What's next for Phoby---
We want to continue to add more levels of intensity to this application, and expand the subject material that we have to work with (dogs, public speaking, bugs, etc.). We also want to implement AR technologies as part of this app at the higher intensity ranges, to allow users to experience more intense simulations of their phobias.
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