Hyper CRC
Strategy
Concept Design
Unity Development
Game Concept Development
MVP Development
Firebase
Unity
OpenVR
Visual Studio App Center
Hyper CRC is an innovative spatial design platform that fuses virtual reality with tangible motion-tracked models, thus enabling companies and their clients to physically experience design visions.
Imagine you’re an interior designer working for a large airplane company. You’ve been assigned to create an exquisite yet functional airplane interior. Being a versatile artist, you’re likely going to prepare a couple of designs showcasing different seat arrangements and decorative features. Putting your client’s satisfaction first, you’ll want to give them a full experience of what sitting in every designed space feels like. So far, given the cost & time of preparing such a product showcase, it has been reserved only for the determined buyers. Yet, product presentations are likely to change with Hyper CRC.
UNIT9 approached us looking for a tech and creative partner that'd be highly knowledgeable about cutting-edge technology and could be trusted with a large-in-scope project commissioned by a multinational giant. Our main role was to help UNIT9 with the underlying technology of Hyper and digital assets, including Hyper website & Hyper SDK.
The issue with VR apps is that the items you see in front of your eyes are not touchable, intractable since they are not physically there. Hyper is trying to create a bridge between these two worlds by mapping physical objects in VR and make them interactable.
One of the MVPs of Hyper includes two actual airplane seats, so when you put on the VR goggles,you find yourself inside an airplane. The virtual seats appear exactly at the same place where the physical seats are so you can sit and adjust their details to your likings: including material or color.
Since Hyper’s use cases are plenty and it can be applied to many industries, we proposed to create a core SDK and place our reusable code there. This will help us when we are working on different projects, prototypes, or MVPs because the core framework will always be the same. Apart from that, we’ve created a tower defense game using the Hyper SDK. No doubt, it’s a great way to showcase tech capabilities through gamification.
In our book, a good project must be challenging. And Hyper’s sole description sounds like one of these groundbreaking challenges. Indeed, that was the case. For the duration of this project, we had to deal with two major obstacles:
Technology - VR tech is getting better... but it’s still not perfect. Headsets still cause eye fatigue for many users, causing the experience to be limited in time (usually no more than 10-15 minutes). Trackers sometimes get blocked out and don’t track the positions accurately. Interactions are still limited because of the lack of a common, solid technology for tracking user's hand movements.
Solution? We stuck with solid platforms and documented which conditions work best for the technology we currently have, to maximize the experience time and make it extra memorable. In the end, Hyper is a great learning experience for us in terms of user interaction with VR tech. Additionally and together with UNIT9, we tested & evaluated new technologies, including RFIDs for tracking or Microsoft Azure Kinect.
Organisational - Collaborating with 4 different partners is a challenge in itself. Each partner had a separate vision for the product and coming to a unanimous decision could have been really hard.
Solution? We had weekly partner meetings and each partner summarized the week from their perspective. These meetings were really helpful for creating a bigger picture of the product. We also divided the tasks based on partners’ responsibilities. We have all agreed that the business development is in Viewport’s hands, while production is on Unit9 and Apptension.
