Scenery implementation

The sidewalks of the original project had little to none objects. To increase the sense of realism, trees and signs have been added. An important point was to make the street look as close to a Swedish street as possible, therefore research was made about how the signs look and objects were created accordingly. Textures and colors of the trees were changed to be more similar to what is common on Swedish streets. To make the changes as correctly as possible, an actual Swedish street was used as referens - Birger Jarlsgatan.

Background noise has also been added to create a more immersive environment.

OBS! Please click on the picture to see it in better resolution. 

Before picture:

After picture:

Screen Space Ambient Occlusion

Hello!

During the last week we have investigated some of the lighting settings that are available

in Unity. We have made small adjustments to the color of the light, furthermore we

have adjusted the appearance of shadows in holes and creases. This might seem like subtle changes,

but well tuned lighting and shading effects can have great positive impact on the immersiveness and realism of the scene.

The images below shows the effects of applying Screen space ambient occlusion(SSAO), a computer graphics technique for real time approximation of ambient occlusion. What this technique does, is that it darkens corners, cavities and other surface points that are close to each other.

Take a careful look where the house facade meet the sidewalk:

1. With SSAO

2. Without SSAO

Welcome!

Hello and welcome! This blog is tied to the course MVK at the Royal Institute of Technology, and its purpose is to document the progress on our software project.

The students behind this project are Tom Axblad, Gabriel Chang, Ajla Elmasdotter, Erik Engelhardt,

Lisa Li, Mona Lindgren, Li Ling, Carl Nyströmer, Alvaro Ortega Gonzalez, Christina Sonebo, Jakob Vyth and Sara Wahrenberg. The name of our project is Realistic street rendering in a virtual reality walkthrough for therapy and urban design, and it extends upon a prototype for street rendering created by the master student Oscar Friberg. (Here is a link to his Master Thesis: https://kth.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:946115/FULLTEXT01.pdf)

Our goal with the project is to expand on this prototype and add features in order to increase its realism and immersiveness.

Car implementation

We have used Unity's standard car asset and made some modifications. The car is programmed to follow a predetermined path using a modified version of the CarWaypointBased prefab and Oscar Friberg's path movement script. The cars will respawn at the end of the path.

Before:

After: