VIRTUAL REALITY + DESIGN SYSTEM + UNITY

NewtonVR

The first physics interaction framework for VR

As you can imagine, this launch trailer was a blast to shoot with the Creative team at Tomorrow Today Labs.

Premise: Users bring a lot of assumptions and expectations about how the world works with them into virtual reality. The NewtonVR interaction system allows users to pick up, drop, throw, and use held objects in VR as they naturally would behave in real life.

Approach: Objects can be configured to be picked up at any point, or when grabbed, can rotate and position themselves to match a pre-defined orientation. This lets you pick up a virtual ball from anywhere it's comfortable to hold, as well as pick up a virtual hammer and have it orient to the grip where it's naturally held while in use.

The physics part of NewtonVR is how objects don't pass through other objects (rigidbodies) or the environment (non-rigidbodies). Instead, held objects interact with other rigidbodies naturally by taking mass into account.

Also included are a few physical UI elements to help with basic menu interfaces and inspire further exploration. You can also dynamically turn the controllers into physical objects on a button press.

Results: After NewtonVR was released, I wrote a complementary guide for UX designers on how to use NewtonVR to create a VR experience from scratch without writing any code. NewtonVR was subsequently adopted and adapted into Unity3d's XR Interaction Toolkit.

Timelime: 2016-2017
Role: Design Lead