Recovery VR: Active Cinema

Active Cinema is a sequence based minigame in which the player must perform tasks and interact with a dashboard of switches and buttons to keep a film running. The player can select which film they would like to watch when playing via a selection menu. This menu system was also used in the Eye Flex minigame.

Task Breakdown:

• Visibility: After a certain amount of time, the film screen will cut to black and the player is required to move the visibility knob to either end of the dial to restore it.

• Width: After a certain period, the width of the video player displaying the film will decrease, requiring the player to push the appropriate button to reset it.

• Height: After a certain period, the height of the video player displaying the film will decrease, requiring the player to push the appropriate button to reset it.

• Curtains: After a certain amount of time, red curtains on either side of the video player begin to close, restricting the players view, requiring them to pull the appropriate lever to re-open them.

• Shutters: After a certain amount of time, shutters in front on the control room will begin to close, requiring the player the pull the appropriate lever to open them.

• Screen rotation: After a certain time period, the video player will begin to rotate, flipping the players view of the film upside down, requiring them to crank the wheel to reset it.

Similar to the other minigames, Active Cinema accounts for three different levels of difficulty, all of which are demonstrated through the amount, timing and speed of tasks when playing. The easy difficulty requires the player to watch over the film visibility dial, screen width and height buttons and the curtain lever. The delay between each of these tasks is greater than the harder difficulties. The medium difficulty contains the previously mentioned tasks with the additions of the rotation wheel and the shutters lever. Finally, the hard difficulty contains the same number of tasks but has the shortest delay between each task.

To manage the sequencing and running of these events I became very familiar with Unity coroutines, a method I had not had much experience with using prior. After working on this minigame my opinion of them is that they can be an extremely useful way of running code outside of the update function, and can ultimately help improve performance, which is ideal for virtual reality. The sequence is set up in such a way that once one event coroutine ends and the player has completed the appropriate task, a random index of the array that stores them is chosen and the coroutine stored at that index is started, triggering the next event.

Dashboard elements I made prior to using VRTK demonstrated above.

Whilst developing this minigame, I got the opportunity to experiment with making my own wheel, levers and dials using a combination of cubes, cylinders, spheres and hinge joints. I managed to make a functional dashboard using these pieces in congruence with events, but eventually switched to using prefabs provided by the virtual reality tool kit (VRTK) as they were much smoother and easier to manage. I am glad I tried my hand at making my own, as I feel I learned more about joints in Unity and different ways of approaching these kinds of mechanics because of it.

Self made dashboard vs current VRTK dashboard.