Santa's Sleigh Ride

At Raumgleiter (which is now partially integrated into Tend), I worked on a virtual reality sleigh ride for a shopping mall. I was responsible for programming the inital versions of the VR player and control panel, as well as texturing various 3D objects.

Final Project

The visitors of the ride climb onto a motion platform and put on a VR headset. In the headset, they see an animation where they fly from the North Pole to the client's shopping mall. The motion platform they're on moves in sync with the events in the VR animation.

Tech

The VR player runs in the browser of the Meta Quest 2. It consists of two spheres (one for each eye) that play a 360° video and a “waiting room”. (Waiting room is kind of exaggerated, it’s just some text and snowflakes.)

The control panel is a Node.js app running on a Raspberry Pi. It’s responsible for communicating with the motion platform (via UDP) and headsets (via WebSockets).

The control panel's user interface is a website running in Chromium in kiosk mode. It allows the operator to start a ride and provides guidance for setting up the device.

Texturing

I also textured a sleigh and it’s engines: