I’ve been AFK for a while (holiday) so I just wanted to post the details of the final version of “night at the museum” I finished a few weeks ago that I delivered as part of my Udacity VR course.

The project went well (in that I passed) but I have to admit it was an exercise in restraint as much as anything. Like a lot of people, I tend to have big plans for everything I make but those plans are not always practical. This project was no exception. While I am ultimately happy with what I created, I do consider it very much a minimum viable project. When it comes to working on assignments like this there are a number of things to consider. First and foremost for me is available time.

I’m totally loving learning VR development, at this point, I spend almost all my free time doing it. But working full time and having a young family is a busy time in life, so if I want to progress projects I have to be efficient with my time or things can stagnate. Also, I currently pay for my studies via a monthly subscription so every extra month a project slips into comes at a significant extra cost.

Just to give you a few examples of compromises made on this project:

1. Playing content at each of the stations was fairly limited and doesn’t have much finesse. For example, the final build allows the user to play audio from all 5 stations at the same time, this leads to a fairly horrible experience if a user does this
2. I reused a museum model from a previous project because it was faster than building my own. This means it’s not really an ideal setup. Space feels a little constrained and doesn’t provide much room to move about. Most real museums are quite spacious so it didn’t really fit the aesthetic I was aiming for
3. I wasn’t that happy with the spatial audio implementation. The environment had a bit too much reverberated for my liking and given more time I would have improved this a bit
4. There’s no environmental audio, just the content of the stations. I’d preferred to add some atmosphere to the scene just to add the feel of the place

There are loads of other things that could be better about the final deliverable, but ultimately what was made “did the job”. Creating anything is always a series of compromises and I think delivering something you can live with and (resourcing permitting) can be built upon, is more important than getting things perfect. Perfection, after all, is the enemy of the shipped.

If you’re interested in the project’s code, it’s all available on my Github account. Enjoy.