Introduction to the Virtual Experience Engine

Virtual Reality (VR) applications can be of significant benefit to teaching and learning. VR allows students to gain an intuitive, spatial understanding of 3D concepts and data, and undergo training relating to hazardous activities or environments without risk. VR applications can also be useful in research for the presentation or examination or results, or the production of 3D interactive environments required for research or industry.

Creating feature-rich VR applications from scratch is a substantial undertaking, requiring significant development time and expertise, especially if these applications are to support multi-user functionality. The  VE2 (Virtual Experience Engine) platform facilitates the development and delivery of substantive, multi-user, VR applications through a multitude of pre-written building blocks and APIs. VE2 handles all networking, VR/flatscreen integration, and interaction systems. VE2 developers must undergo training to setup a VE2 project and utilise these features.

Many of the concepts and skills learnt in this course will be transferable to development in other VR frameworks.

Syllabus

• Setting up a Unity project with the VE2 development tools
• A run-through of the user-facing VE2 tutorial to gain understanding of the controls, interface, and interaction systems provided by VE2
• Creation of a simple 3D environment, with simple components such as VE2 InfoPoints and VE2 Grabbables
• Implementation of more advanced components such as VE2 Activatables and VE2 Adjustables and writing basic scripts to handle their operation
• Implementation of integrated VE2 user interfaces
• Implementation of basic bespoke netcode
• Workshopping a design for a simple VR application
• Creating, exporting a simple VR application using the above components

This course combines independent study, following videos and other training material produced by the course tutors, and three scheduled in-person workshops. Completion of the independent study sections should take no more than two hours per week, in addition to some set up time before the start of the course. Each chunk of independent study will be followed by an in-person workshop, which will be two hours each. These will reinforce the material learned during independent study, introduce more advanced concepts, provide an opportunity to playtest your created games with other participants of the course, using the VR hardware in one of Imperial's VR labs, and enable the tutors to give direct, in-person support.

This course is open to Research Degree Students, Postdocs & Research Fellows. Limited spaces available for wider Imperial community.

Learning Outcomes

After completing this workshop, you will be better able to:

• State the utility of VE2 for development of VR applications
• Classify the different components provided by VE2 and explain their relationships
• Implement simple C# code to interact with the VE2 API
• Describe the broad structure of the network architecture of multiplayer VE2 systems
• Design and implement a simple multiplayer VE2 application

Prerequisites

• An intermediate understanding of an object-oriented programming language such as Java, C#, C++ or Python. ECRI offers a course in Object-Oriented Python that would fulfil this requirement.
•  An understanding of Unity’s fundamentals including Unity’s component system, familiarity with the Unity editor, and awareness of Unity’s scripting API. ECRI offers an Introduction to Unity 3D course which would meet this requirement.
• A working knowledge of Git and GitHub. This could be from attending this ECRI course, or equivalent experience from elsewhere.
• Unity installed on a laptop for hands-on work, please see the minimum system requirements.

Important Pre-Course Information

This course covers more content than we'll be able to get through in the 6 hours of in-person teaching time, so attendees are expected to spend approximately 2 hours working through course content before each in-person class.

How to book

• Early Career Researchers (Research Degree Students, Postdocs, Research Fellows) should book via Inkpath using your Imperial Single-Sign-On.
• All other members of the Imperial community, should book here.

Please ensure you have read and understood ECRI’s cancellation policy before booking.