StevieVu | VR Developer
My name is Stevie Vu and I'm focused on Virtual Reality. Follow this blog if you want updates on how my projects are going as well as what I'm learning.
Friday, December 31, 2021
Quest 2 - Application Space Warp and Optimization Test
Thursday, December 2, 2021
December 2nd - Spatial Partitioning and Custom Playables with Timeline
My goal this week was to to improve the performance of my flock simulation by improving the main update loop.
Spatial Partitioning
Currently, the main bottle neck is how I implemented the Separation method for the flock controller which needs to do a distance check against all of flocks in the scene. This quickly becomes really expensive because each additional flock added increases the number of calculations needed in update for everyone.
In order to improve this I wanted to try and implement Spatial Partitioning. How it would work would be to split the map into grids where the distance check for each flock would only be against the other flocks in the same cell and ignoring the ones outside of it.
Thursday, November 25, 2021
Nov 25th - Procedural Animation and Basic Shaders
I did some animation rigging during my last project with the Dune worm and I decided that I wanted to do a really deep dive into it. So far I've been having a lot of fun and feel like the animation rigging package could really help me create some great boss battles and more easily creating cinematic/scripted events. Here are some clips from what I've been experimenting with.
Walker-Bot
My first mini project was to try and create a walking 2-legged robot where the legs automatically move themselves after they exceed a set distance from the main body. It was amazing when I got it work and I could see the legs automatically animating themselves while manually moving the Walker-Bot around. Here is a GIF where you can see me manually moving the body with the legs procedurally animating themselves.
Saturday, November 20, 2021
November 13th - My Team's VR Mario Showcase Project
During the PXR2021 Conference there was a goal of creating some sort of collaborative virtual reality project throughout the week. I wanted to participate because I thought this could be a fun short-term creative VR project opportunity.
My team had students across multiple disciplines and background. Not everyone could meet at the same day/time and as a result it was only towards the last 2-3 days of the conference that we really got going with sort of VR project.
For my team we had a few students who really wanted us to help them create a Mario inspired VR experience. Using that as our creative theme and direction we made a Nintendo Mario themed Altspace world.
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Poster art by Dylan Coakes |
Friday, November 19, 2021
Nov 14 - Performance and XR 2021 Virtual Reality Conference
I got an opportunity to attend the Performance and XR 2021 Virtual Reality Conference through a director at the Centre for Entertainment and Arts. The whole conference was centered around using Altspace as the VR venue.
When I first tried VR Chat I remember getting motion sickness after a while of using it. Similarly I'm finding a bit of motion sickness in Altspace when using continuous loco-motion but I think I'm starting to build more resistance to it now. Either way, I do prefer using the teleport locomotion since I get far less motion sickness with it. At the moment I find both VR chat and Altspace to be pretty similar to one another.
I also built my first Altspace world as well.
Experiencing and Building worlds in Altspace
For my first Altspace world I decided to try and create a scene inspired from the big sci-fi movie Dune with a world that has a giant Desert Worm hopping around.
This is footage from the Unity Editor where I first created the VR experience. However, I found that you can't just directly import the Unity scene into Altspace. There is a huge limitation where you can't use be uploading a scene that utilizes any custom C# monobehavior scripts.
After experimenting for an afternoon, I decided to use Unity's Timeline sequencing to create this scene and trigger the sound and particle effects at the right time. Kinda sucks that you can't use scripting at all. Especially since I had spent the time rigging the worm using Unity's Animation Rigging which allowed for real-time animation. Regardless I was still able to pretty much deliver the full VR experience I intended for VR.
For the modeling I used Probuilder to create the Dune Worm.
If you want to check out this Altspace world you can using the world code : PKI578.