Smart Home Planner

Smart Home Planner

     Smart home planner is an interactive application which features Oculus Rift as a display and Razor hydra as a controller. This application allows the user to plan their room with their desired furniture. The reason why I started this project because I love going to Ikea. In Ikea they have a lot of room exhibition. However, I think all those exhibition cost a lot of money judging by each furniture's price. what if Ikea were to use Smart home planner application. Just put the Oculus rift and a razor hydra using a very small area to operate this application. The designer can come and change the design of the room everyday so that when the customer wear the Oculus they will see a very beautiful room fully decorated for them. Moreover, the user can use the application to design their room and visualize it with their own eyes. It would give the customer a pleasure knowing that their room will look exactly like what they want it to look.

Technical Explanation
     
     This application requires hard work to make. Because we have many furniture to make. Therefore, we have to concern about high poly models. However, I did not experience any lagging in the application. Therefore, it went as a successful production of 3d model. In terms of interaction we have to work very hard on figuring out the razor hydra controller input and apply it to our application. We have 4 interactions which we will be listed below

1. Pick up/Drip object - the user can pick up the object and drop them at their desired position.
2. Remove object - the user can remove any object they have picked up in case they want to make some changes to their plan
3. Change color - the user can change color of the furniture by twisting their right hand. each model have at least 3 color.
4. Rotate object - the user can rotate object to be oriented in a position that they prefer
5. GUI interface - the user can choose their furniture using GUI interface as an in-game catalog. GUI interface is one of the most difficult interaction to make because it involves Oculus rift display. In Oculus Rift, any OnGUI function in unity 3d will not work. The GUI will never show itself. Therefore, we have to use 3d GUI instead. At that time Unity 5 was not available yet. It was available with beta version so me and my partner decided not to risk our project on a beta version. We create our UI interface with game objects like planes and interact with it using ray cast.

     In conclusion, Smart Home Planner is a fine home planning application which involves a very realistic interaction. It is a virtual reality technology that allow the user to immerse with the and experience home planning like they never did before.