With the technology that we used in our experience it is possible for the user to dive fully into our factory and enjoy it without any major distortion or nausea. Nevertheless, we faced some challenges.

At the start of the project we had quite a few issues when it comes to getting everything to work on multiple platforms. Since this was one of the requirements of the project, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get everything to work together. Unfortunately, there was always one headset not working (either Rift or Vive). Within our team we have mostly Vive’s and Rift’s so it was very important for us to get this to work. Using Unity regular’s XR System would cause it not to work on the Vive and using Valve’s OpenVR seemed to make the Oculus version crash.  This is something we spend a lot of time on trying to debug the problem. Eventually we figured out that by turning Steam’s experimental Beta feature on it would work, also within Unity the Oculus support has to be turned off under XR management, else it’ll still crash.
 

Why do we have to turn off Oculus support when we want Oculus support?
The reason for this is because it simply won’t work on the Vive and the other way around it should be fine. If we leave the Oculus option on in Unity, Oculus home will force itself over SteamVR and won’t allow us to run the application. We couldn’t find a way around this, however, if we leave just the SteamVR support option turned on, it will still be compatible on the Oculus Rift, sometimes you might have to open SteamVR manually though.

One issue that we tackled during user testing was nausea problems. We didn’t limit our teleportation throughout the factory, so the player would teleport upon moving objects such as conveyor belts which consist of a moving texture on top of a smoothened cylinder shape. When players would stand inside the conveyor belt at an unnatural distance to the floor their depth perception got lost and it was causing nausea.

Since the object size was not as in reality (way closer to the eye when looking down) and the eyes couldn't tell the brain anymore how far down the floor actually is, because there was nothing else to see then all the moving texture around them.  

What added to this was the constant waste that was approaching the player because it was transported on the conveyor belt. So there, accommodation happened, since the objects were first far away and the eye muscle was still relaxed and able to tell the brain its distance, but suddenly it comes way closer and then there is another piece of waste already below you... So the constant change of looking in the far to see the next object on the conveyor belt and then again close up to one that is "touching your body" is not an ideal experience and can't be happening in the long term. As also explained in the presentation: when the brain receives mismatching cues between the distance of a virtual 3D object and the focus distance which is required to focus on that object it gets to be an unpleasant experience.

This happened, even though when building the factory we paid attention to the viewer's perception and avoid any issues such as the accommodation convergence issue which is anyway not common in VR headsets with HDM displays since the focus is on the screen the whole time.
In this case, we got an easy way to solve this such as limiting player teleportation to those risky areas.

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USING THE OCULUS RIFT S IN OUR VR EXPERIENCE:

The Oculus Rift S is a tethered VR headset designed to work with a PC. It features a per eye, 1,280-by-1,440 resolution with an 80Hz refresh rate, and uses your PC for processing. This means that the Rift S handles impressive graphics that wouldn't necessarily work on a standalone headset. Since we are working with a lot of different models for each recycling process as well as the incoming waste in our VR game, it is important for us that the headset we use is capable to handle and show all the different used textures and works with heavy files. So, the system relies on the hardware to which it’s attached, you get a better graphical experience.

The Rift S delivers unparalleled immersion with the flexibility of inside-out tracking, which means track positions HDM in 3D space.

It maximizes the tracking volume with no need for external sensors to allow the player to view what’s happening around them without taking off the headset.

Which is very important for a realistic behavior and interactions inside our factory, when thinking about grabbing, throwing and sorting waste.

As well as using the handles and sliders on the claw interaction for example.

The Oculus Rift S has full room-scale tracking built right into the headset, no sensors needed. This was very handy and important for our project since  a more dynamic experience is allowed and people can freely walk around in factory explore and teleport throughout any complication because of been outside of any sensors. Also when setting up the headset around campus for the students to try it requires less time.

Also the integrated sound system is another comfort which enables the immersion of the player directly by perfect sounds, since right at the beginning a voice over is played to guide the users during their first steps in the factory.

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What I like about VR tech:

For me as a very unexperienced VR user it was great to get involved and surrounded completely by a digital environment. I realized quickly that it was not familiar for me to have a screen so close to my eyes which made it hard in the beginning for me to change my focus quickly from objects or text close to my eyes and more far away. As I researched the accommodation convergence problem.

I really liked working with VR tech: How to behave in a three-dimensional space, moving around and reaching out to manipulate the surroundings. The sensitive touch controllers enable super realistic movements and surprised me a lot as well as the eye tracking which determines what a person is looking at.

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What I didn’t like about VR tech:

It requires a lot of technical knowledge and experience to have smooth working VR experience. Sometimes it was frustrating to have visions that was not able to execute by oneself. Also in our game it was quite hard to set the correct floor height, so when playing I would smash the controller on the floor because it was too high. This happened since we first had the foundation the interactions and then added the building. But we were able to fix that and it works smoothly now.

Due to the difficulty to read text in VR it was quite a  problem in our factory to read the text of the tablet on the players wrist. No matter how close or far you put the wrist from your eyes (headset it wouldn’t focus). It made the player squeeze their eyes which can cause headaches and nausea.

Blurry images in the headset research:

We can distinguish between low-quality lenses and a high-quality lens.

For example comparing Google Cardboard with Oculus Rift.

In basic VR theory (functions) both work same way if we consider but, the lens quality is completely different. The Oculus Rift S offers way less blurry images compared to the google cardboard. The positioning of the lens with your eye distance is non-customizable and there is no headband in case of google cardboard.

Ways to fix it:

• Adjusting your eye-position with the lens is a big factor to see clear images. Today’s generation VR headsets have this feature of positioning the lens with the Eye.

• Adjust the Scope to get an in-focus image. It’s normal to see the screen slightly blurry for far vision.

• Adjust the lens for your specific eye distance. If you have customized eye-to-eye distance for yourself it might need different settings for somebody else using the same headset.

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