VR Interactive Feature - Minimap
Year of Work | 2021-2022
Position | Virtual & Augmented Reality Software Engineer
Tools Used | Unity, Pico Neo 3, C#, Virtual Reality,
Features | Prototyping, Scripting, Interactions, VR UI, Virtual Reality, Navigation
One of the very first things I created as a professional software engineer was a minimap. I was tasked to come up with a small project to introduce me to the code base and at the time, the company was focused on architecture work and with my background in construction, I thought that creating a minimap, which was very helpful in my construction days, was something that would be interesting to me and useful to for my team members to see as a prototype.
I wanted the minimap to be able to be operated with as little buttons as possible, as it is hard for people to coordinate what buttons do what and hoped that would make it more intuitive to operate. My first version is below:
The idea was that on one side of the base was the world side- the whole scene in Unity is encompassed on the map. The other side of the base would be the building side- if the map is inside of a building, it would show a 3D version of that. If the map is held close to vertical on either side (world or building), it would show a 2D version of that side. There are placeholders on the building side as the time I had to create this didn't allow for that, but it turns out the team liked my prototype so much that it became a feature within the actual product! I would then have to think about how to improve the minimap to make it more feature full and easy to use.
Here is a a basic version of the minimap, showing the world and building side, the transparent vs. solid modes and 3D and 2D versions of each side while also displaying either my location or some of the bookmarks in the world.
The video below shows that the map displays your location as anyone moves:
To extend the functionality, I prototyped a version where a user can grab anyone and relocate them like you can in Google Maps:
The prototype to prove the functionality and interaction usability is shown below:
