Rory.games

Ultraleap's showcase of VR interactions. The demo encompasses a number of interactions I directly researched and created, such as Physical Hands for interaction, Jump Gems for teleportation, and the zero-gravity toy.

I also helped architect many of the underlying systems and did extensive performance work to improve the experience on stand-alone VR headsets.

Jump Gems are a VR locomotion method I developed, with the emphasis of being able to perform all the required actions with a single continuous interaction. A user would pinch the gem (located on their wrist), aim to where they want to teleport to, and then release to teleport.

They are available within the Ultraleap Unity and Unreal plugins, and have been used as the teleportation method throughout Aurora.

I rebuilt a large amount of the underlying application functionality of the Ultraleap Control Panel to work directly in Unity. It involved a lot of work that covered the full stack of the Ultraleap tracking service, all the way from USB information to image streaming and camera calibration.

The Ultraleap XR Launcher is an internal showcase of 2D interactions with direct hand interactions. I worked on several key interactions such as hover states, sliders, and text fields, as well as many parts of the underlying technical functionality.

My PhD summarises the research projects undertaken while at Ultraleap. It's three projects that look into the differences between controllers and hand tracking, while attempting to replicate the missing haptic feedback that comes with the use of camera-vision based hand tracking. I developed two studies, the first about varying UI visual reactions and their association to haptic responses, and the second about fine motor skill tasks when comparing hand tracking to controllers.

The haptic rendering algorithm I developed during the second study was patented.

The PhD also covers the work undertaken to create the user study tool PlayRecorder, featured below.

PlayRecoder is an open-source logic recording tool for use within Unity. It's designed for recording user study trials, and works within both the editor and built applications. A suite of extra tools are included to help the researcher during their analysis.

The tool was built during my PhD, and was subsequently used during my main user study. It allowed for me to easily record every user within my simulations, and then quickly analyse their actions by using the messages, timeline, and statistics features.

By utilising graphics principles of displacement maps, and then mapping the associated values to the intensity frequency of haptics, we were able to produce varying types of textures. This was all achieved using ultrasound transducers and I demoed the application at WorldHaptics 2019. This work also resulted in a patent, which can be viewed in the link above.

Event Planning VR was the research piece created for my final year dissertation project of my BSc in Games Programming. It was developed to test and compare the difference and nuances between both the standard PC learning environment and a fully tracked virtual reality environment.

Users were recorded throughout the study, with their movements and actions being analysed. These recordings can be seen in the video above, where they were analysed within a secondary scene.

Uni Student Manager is a 38 week university student simulator, where you take full control of a student and guide them through their year. It was developed as part of my BSc Games Programming course.

The game was written in C++ and uses the Allegro library. It has a full timetable, assignment, grading, work, studying and needs system, each one being crucial to the overall gameplay.

Levels Watch Face was the first Android Wear watch face I developed with the AW 5.0 Watch Face API. It comes with a fully-fledged configuration application that allows for extensive customisation.

The watch face received several thousand downloads and was featured on multiple Google Android adverts, being part of the Wear what you want campaign.