ElectriCITY
Explore Demand and supply in this asynchron teaching experience
Created Summer Semester 2022
ElectriCITY was intended as an asynchronous, collaborative learning experience about electricity demand and supply with simulating real life data in an immersive Environment.
Use Case
We wanted to create a course with a focus on teamwork and the possibility to work worldwide with different students, teachers, professors, and trainees from the EUT+ program. By using the CAVE and VR both users get their own set of tools. Through this, we want to motivate teamwork and hope to create an exchange between the EUT+ universities, to get different inputs from each background in planning and organizing.
Technology
For this project, we used a combination of VR, VIVE trackers, and a so-called CAVE.
A Cave or also Cave Automatic Virtual Environment is a room that uses projection on multiple sides to create a virtual environment.
The Cave Player had a VIVE tracker, for body tracking, and 2 VIVE controllers for interacting with the environment.
The second player used an Oculus Quest.
The Cave Player
The Cave Player had the role of supervisor and would hand out different buildings to the VR player and would also check the voltage and electricity production.
The Cave user would choose a building in cooperation with the VR player and would use the teleporter to give the obj over.
The VR Player
The VR player had the role of the building manager. He would place buildings on the grid, create a city system, and make sure that enough electricity would be produced and equally distributed.
For that, he had a table/belt where the obj would appear after the supervisor gave them over.
Player Interaction
The core element of this project was the interaction between two players. For that, I created the “Building Manager”. This script would keep track of which buildings were given over to the VR user and which place in the belt would be free to spawn the object.
The biggest challenge with these scrips was handing over the information between the players using Photon, which is a server add-on for Unity.
For placing the buildings we needed to synchronies them betwenn the users.
Visualizing Data
For visualizing the electricity flow and the rate of consumption, I created two shaders.
For the flow visualization, a Voronoi-noise-based shader was used, where the noise size could be changed to give the image of a lot of electricity flowing.
For the rate of consumption, the shader worked with vertex displacement. Change the vertices on a plane to show spikes in usage or production.
Data Grid
Voltage Flow
Created in Collaboration with
Lisa Fröhlich responsible for setting up Photon,
Jonathan Kuchenbrod responsible for 3d Design and environment design
and Lars Skogseide, responsible for placing buildings on the floor
This overview focuses on my personal work