White Noise Environment in VR
Kristjan Kitse
This project is part of my bachelor thesis to make a VR environment where it's possible to make people hallucinate. For this I'm using Unreal Game Engine 4.
Project plan
I plan to construct a simple VR environment where different everyday objects can be hidden in plain sight, so the player has to look for objects by moving around slightly. On some occasions, there actually will be no object present, but the environment should make the player wrongly think (hallucinate) that they see some object anyway.
For this it's needed to:
- Create a noisy shader for VR that is static when the player is not moving, but dynamic when the player is moving (or vice versa)
- Allow for different levels of randomness in the shader (for finding the threshold where it's easiest to induce hallucinations in people, this could be either very small noise or big "ink blobs")
- Make objects appear gradually (either by changing their opacity, level of randomness in the shader or something else completely).
- Recognise the moment when player sees some object.
- Create basic UI.
The inspiration behind the experience is the fact that human brains are excellent at finding patterns. A nice example is hearing the song "White Christmas" hidden in random white noise when instructed to do so, even though no song is actually present. Can we do the same with visual stereoscopic perception?
Foreseen difficulties:
- This will be my first time using Unreal Engine, which might cause some difficulties in the development process.
- Find some useful information from tracking the player's headset. (Recognise if test subject sees something)
Milestone 1 (09.03)
- Learn the ins and outs of Unreal Game Engine.
- Start reading "Unreal Engine VR Cookbook: Developing Virtual Reality with UE4".
- Create initial test environment.
You can add development notes here, or remarks on the progress / result. Screenshots and videos are always good!
Milestone 2 (23.03)
- Experiment with different noise algorithms and find out what works best
- Read Chapter 8 (Motion Controller Interaction) from "Unreal Engine VR Cookbook: Developing Virtual Reality with UE4"
- Develop initial functionality for using hand controllers.