Again, Unity and the SteamVR plugin have been chosen as the development environment for this experiment. The technical design behind this system is to mimic the idea behind a joystick on a gamepad, where the player sets their starting position and then the direction and distance from the user’s head to the starting position. This gives the user 360 degrees of movement. The distance measure also applies to the users velocity, where the further away the user is, the faster they will move.

I start with a basic Unity environment(v2019.3.7f1) using SteamVR(v2.6.1). This game engine and VR utility were chosen, because of ease in development for multiple platforms simultaneously and personal familiarity with the API. 

The designed objective for experimentation would be to accurately pick up the most likely intended ball out of a container with multiple balls in it. This represents a recreation of an observed issue in other experiences, where objects grouped together can be tricky to grab the intended object on first try.

After researching best practices and techniques for VR optimization and multiplatform development, I developed my own demo built for Quest 2 and the Valve Index. In this project, I decided to start learning Unity XR Toolkit to build a platform agnostic experience. The plugin actually worked pretty well for this demo. I designed the controls to be physical buttons and the simple grip button that is pretty standard across VR platforms. Doing this made building for different platforms easy since I only had to adjust build settings to switch between PC and Android builds.