Difference between revisions of "Team:NRP-UEA-Norwich/Practices/VirtualReality"

To talk about our project instead of using graphs and papers we decided to immerse ourselves into the virtual reality world. The moment you put on the Gear VR you say goodbye to your beloved friends and family and are transported into the Shewanella Oneidensis bacteria where you can witness the magic of biology in first person. We hope this would give people a better understanding of what our project is all about.

The demo consists of two parts. Firstly, we teach you about what you’re seeing and their functions, how electrons move, and what happens to them. In the second part you get to be that electron yourself, diving into proteins, examining their appearance from up close and thinking “why haven’t I tried this before”.

A video can be found below

All software we used is free of charge and can be downloaded from their official websites. The models in the demo are proteins taken from the Protein Data Bank. However, we couldn’t use the .pdb files directly in Unity 3D, therefore some format conversion has to be done.

• Unity 3D - game development platform that allows you to build games for VR with a single click of a button.
• Chimera - great and easy tool to view the protein files and export them to .wrml format
• Maya - to import it to Unity the .wrml format has to be then converted to either .fbx or .obj formats. After that you’re good to go!
• Blender - some objects were too heavy for the smartphones we were developing for so we used blender to lower the quality and remove any extra unnecessary details.
• iTween great plugin to animate objects that has saved us a lot of time.