How do butterflies see the world? As humans, it’s easy to take our senses for granted, especially when it comes to vision. We have a certain level of visual acuity and perception that we consider to be “normal,” but when we look at the world from the perspective of other animals, our “normal” is just […]
Did you know that no single monarch completes the species’ entire Great Migration in a lifespan? Monarchs born in the summer live two to six weeks while those born in August can live up to nine months by entering reproductive diapause, which prolongs life by delaying reproductive functions. This and countless other fascinating facts are […]
It’s been a busy few months at NatureSims. Since our last post, we have updated our flight mechanics, improved our avatar calibration for different player body sizes, redesigned our demo environment, and migrated our project to a new rendering pipeline in Unity to give us a performance boost. We were also recently awarded a grant […]
Simulator Sickness & User Comfort User comfort is an important topic in VR, particularly as VR experiences have a greater tendency to cause simulator sickness in users. It is especially important here, as even with the basic flight mechanics described above, this simulation is already in the “intense” category. While not all researchers agree on […]
Building our butterfly avatar’s flight capabilities in Unity based on our simplified flight model A note to readers: as before, we’re embedding some short video clips of the avatar’s flight capabilities in action—but please keep in mind that the environment that you will see in these videos will bear little-to-no resemblance to the environment we’ll […]
In the last post, we covered the creation of the monarch butterfly avatar that players will embody in this VR game/simulation. In this post, we’ll be discussing the development of our avatar’s flight capabilities, using the Nvidia PhysX engine in Unity. As a starting point, it’s important to first understand the basics of how real […]
Part I: The Body This NatureSims post is focused on the creation of the monarch butterfly player avatar, or the butterfly body players will occupy when they enter the simulation. This will be a fairly high-level overview of this process, so don’t expect lots of code snippets or details about various Unity settings. (That said, […]
With our first public VR prototype, Frogworld, now available on Oculus and Steam, we are excited to announce the next area of focus for NatureSims™. Our primary goal is to reimagine the nature documentary for the new mediums of virtual and augmented reality through gamified, first-person simulations and companion educational applications. All in the hope […]
At long last Frogworld is available for early release on Steam. As the first NatureSims™ volume, Frogworld represents the beginning of what I hope will be a long series dedicated to bringing users closer to nature by experiencing the lives of some of our most intriguing animal cousins in an immersive, first-person format that is […]
Our planet is warming, ecosystems are collapsing, and we may already be in the midst of the sixth great mass extinction on Earth, with tens of thousands of species threatened. We know people can be responsive to these issues when they begin to care about affected animals. For example, global warming often becomes more salient […]