Keywords: Virtual Reality, Unity, Meeting, Collaboration, Networking, Photon, 360 Video

Snobal Sphere is a multi-user virtual reality collaboration and meeting tool built in Unity. Sphere allows users to meet, host presentations and collaborate on projects all within virtual reality.

Delivered initially for the Pico Neo 2, the projects development was ported to support the newer Pico Neo 3 as well as the Vive Focus 3. Sphere features voice chat support, allowing users to communicate directly, utilising integrated avatars from the Ready Player Me Avatar API with real-time lip-sync to allow for natural feeling conversations in VR.

For the Sphere project I was responsible for the development of the majority of user facing features. These include:

• Networking via Photon Realtime
• Voice chat via Photon Voice
• Integrated customisable user avatars via Ready Player Me
• Real-time user voice avatar lip-sync via Oculus lip-sync plugin
• Virtual reality SDK for both Pico Neo 3 and Vive Focus 3 devices
• UI design and setup

One of the major challenges of this project was being able to test scalable multi-user VR with a limited pool of headsets. To help solve this problem I developed a number of systems to help measure software performance as user numbers increased. These test systems include:

• Cross platform support for VR and Windows standalone versions
• Unity editor first person VR emulation to allow the use of the editor and profiler in testing
• Networked bots to test network and graphical performance of large numbers of players
• CLI initialisation to allow the launching and setup of multiple clients on a AWS EC2 instance

These test systems enabled me to gain a better understanding of graphical and network application performance, by allowing me to simulate large numbers of users in virtual reality.