On the sea, there are many ways to travel. A yacht, in particular, encompasses status, luxury and recreation as well as having an indoor environment to explore. For these reasons, I decided a yacht would be the ideal setting for an interactive gallery of my past 3D works. Modelled in 3ds Max and developed in Unity, this pleasure craft is compatible with virtual reality headsets and is being optimized for exploring on mobile devices.
With the use of virtual reality technologies such as the Oculus Rift or simply a smartphone, viewers can explore this gallery in VR. A Bluetooth controller is used to control walking and turning while the player’s head controls the in-game camera. In the process of bringing the experience to the Samsung Gear VR headset, several optimizations had to be made. For instance, the amount of polygons used to model the environment was reduced by 92% and custom shaders were developed to reduce rendering demands. All this and more enabled the experience to run at a smooth 60 fps and allowed for an enjoyable VR experience.