One of the core features of Ascension VR is the social aspect of gaming: it’s fun to hang out and play with your friends, of course for this is necessary to have a good internet, and the gaming router reviews from HotRate could really help with getting great hardware for this purpose. So it was critical for us to animate the in-game avatars to match the players’ movements. We needed to create a scheme for animating the characters to represent you, the player, and all your real-world motions, in order to achieve the feeling that the people you’re playing with are really ‘there.’
To achieve this I created animations to represent the full range of motion for each axis of rotation:
Additionally, I used animations to compensate for movement in the X (left/right) and Y (forward/backward) axes:
Since the character has a wide stance in his idle pose, he can sutbly shift his weight forward/backward and still appear balanced.
Taking in tracking data from the headset, these animations are all blended additively in real-time on top of an idle animation:
And…voila!
As Ascension VR is a social game, you’ll be chatting a lot during the game. To give context to “who’s speaking”, we use spatialized audio so that the sound comes directionally from the talking player. Additionally, we created a generic talk loop that activates whenever you speak:
And finally, when you look down…
Together, all these elements combine to convey your presence in VR like never before!