The Under Presents blends immersive theater and virtual reality, allowing you to step into a world in VR where you'll interact with characters and other participants. It merges live actors and scripted performances with a narrative arc that centers on themes of time, fate and free will.
Role: Networking Engineer and Game Designer
Tools: Unity3D, Go (language), Python, Photon (Unity)
You can play The Under Presents on your Oculus Quest here!
The Under Presents brings live actors from Pie Hole into our players’ living rooms through their Oculus Quest headset.
For this game, I helped design and develop how live actors interacted with players. As a designer, I was tasked with figuring out the kinds of interactions the actors could have with players, the tools they would need, and when to trigger these interactions. Along with the lead engineer, I also helped develop the networking code for our design prototypes, including creating an innovative puppeting character control system which allowing actors to navigate the space without motion sickness: an important consideration, given that the actors would need to perform for extended periods of time.
We wanted to provide our players with a safer space to interact with strangers. It is especially important in VR to respect and protect our players’ virtual personal physical spaces.
For this, I co-designed and developed the player reporting system which allows players to report other players, protecting them from being victimized, and dissuades bullying behavior.
I also designed the algorithm to prevent accidental or maligned use of the reporting system.
I helped design what inter-player interactions would be like in Unity and also helped craft a hypothesis testing framework in Python that could automatically generate a permutation and combination of network stress tests to ensure that the system would function perfectly even under heavy and unexpected user data.