High Noon VR Air Hockey

High Noon Air Hockey is a tech demo for a multiplayer haptics-driven VR game based on the classic Air Hockey arcade game, using a physical table as the basis for the interactions. We developed this idea by joking around while trying to figure out novel ways to integrate haptic feedback into a VR game or experience. I ended up turning the Oculus' puck-shaped controllers on their head and said "what about air hockey?" Though I meant it in jest, my team took the idea and ran with it.

This is the result:

The Process

Our first order of business was figuring out how to orient the table and that was my purview. I set up the XR Interactions, and worked with my good friend and teammate Logan Kemper in order to make the orienting table function in Passthrough. That ended up looking a bit like the following.

The Environment

While Logan and I were making the nerdy parts of the project in Unity, Aiden was off making an incredible environment. Check it out here, and keep an eye out for the Otters running the Underground Otter Sports League that you are an unaware participant of.

Interaction Design

And while Aiden was doing that stuff, Matt was working on a sweet user interaction mock up. Here's some of his design work. If you want to see more, take a look at his version of this post: Visit Matt's Portfolio.

Summary

This was a fun project, and we learned a lot, especially since it was our first multiplayer game made using Photon. Logan took on lead development for the multiplayer aspects, and I got to peer over his shoulder while he did it.

Where multiplayer is concerned -- that was tremendously challenging. We thought that it would be easy. We were wrong. On the other hand, it was a lot of fun to see people play one of our games together.

Oh! And also, Our buddy Justin helped us print out an attachment for the controllers to make gameplay smoother.