A Bridge Between Bodies

A Bridge Between Bodies is the title of my master’s thesis project at Georgia Tech. I created a PC VR playable sandbox of multiple 3D avatars, each of which implement a shared control scheme and paradigm. The demo is an attempt to argue that 3rd person interaction in VR has a lot of untapped potential for expressive movement and embodiment while side-stepping many of the locomotion-based accessibility issues that VR has, primarily motion sickness.

I was the sole contributor to the project. I wrote my thesis and programmed the demo using Unity and VRTK. My thesis advisor, Micheal Nitsche , helped me resolve many design problems and work out technical problems when I got stuck. Among the challenges, wrangling Physx was the hardest problem to solve. I didn’t attempt to create real simulations of more complex puppetry forms like rod or string, so instead I made heavy use of PID controllers to allow non-kinematic rigidbodies to be directly manipulated by players without over-stretching the connected joints.