virtual showroom
Polygon labs
July 2020 - August 2020
The showroom was a really cool project and a lot of fun to work on. It was an ambitious project - we only had 6 weeks to put it together from scratch, so we had to work fast. The premise was to deliver an interactive 3d environment that would act as a proof of concept for an application where customers could check out real products via their web browser and then add them to a cart. The features we built included customizing the showroom as an author - placing furniture, shelves, and mannequins around the room and then hanging clothes or placing shoes on the shelves and racks. This configuration could then be saved to a database and loaded as an attendee, where you wouldn’t be able to alter the shelves or clothing but you could explore and take a closer look at the products on display. Rather than building out the full multiplayer experience, for the poc we opted to use a pixel stream so that users could interact with the hosted app through their web browser.
My Role
I was the core programmer on the team, working with an artist who handled creation of the 3d environment and apparel assets as well as a UI engineer who implemented the user interface elements.
Technology
Unreal Engine
Challenges
The biggest challenge was working at a pace quick enough that we could get everything done within the 6 week timeline. Additionally there were some features that I had not had much prior experience with including:
Implementation for saving/loading the showroom configurations from the back end database
Implementing some features for the web interface of the pixel stream such as a unique control mechanism ensuring that only one viewer was controlling the ue4 application via the stream at a time
Implementing level streaming such that showrooms could have a different environment depending on the saved data, and the game would stream the appropriate sublevel based on that data