Virtual Reality Museum
Virtual Reality Museum Template for Unity and Oculus Rift
This documentation is the result of the advanced software practical by Dennis Aumiller, Philip Hausner and Philipp Jung, supervised by Dr. Susanne Krömker (Visualization and Numerical Geometry Group, IWR Universität Heidelberg).

Virtual Reality is a trending research topic in the area of computer graphics, with manifold applications. The aim of this practical was to determine the usability of the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) in combination with the Unity Game Engine, and how these two can provide a platform for interactive virtual museums.

This is not a new idea, and has been pursued by other research facilities [1] , museums [2],[ 3],[4], and even Google [5]. In general, such projects aim to generate tours specificallly designed and tailored to the individual museum. In contrast, we present an easy-to-use template, which can be extended and altered by the each museum, thus providing a basis to build scenes from already existing 3D models, making it more accessible to smaller institutions.

As a result, we present a Unity Game Engine template for the creation of such a museum, requiring only already existing 3D models or scenes, which can be explored in a virtual scene, or inspected in a 360° viewer.
The use of this project is licensed under the MIT license. The relevant license text can be found in the Reference section.
Oculus Rift DK2
The Oculus Rift HMD is the first commercially available device of this kind. While there are several other devices in the process of development, the early access to the Development Kits (DK) made it especially attracitve for research as well. The used device in this practical was a Oculus Rift DK2.
Read more about Oculus Rift here [6].
 
Unity 3D Game Engine Logo
The Unity Game Engine is a solid tool for game development, as well as the creation of virtual content of any kind. Since Version 5, it has native support for virtual reality devices such as the Oculus Rift. The version used during the practical was version 5.3.
Read more about the Unity Game Engine here [7].
Universität Heidelberg, 2016