CSU 2022 VR Hackathon

The Challenge

The challenge was for all the teams to create a virtual reality game related towards mental health. Professors from different departments submitted prompts of games they thought would be interesting that related to mental health. Our team name was Unreal Haptics (even though we used unity) choose a prompt relating to helping people over come a fear, we chose the acrophobia (the fear of heights).

Starting off

Going into this, I didn’t know Unity and I didn’t know my teammates, and my teammates didn’t know unity. So there was a lot of learning over the course of these 3 days. After we came up with our idea to make a game to help people overcome a fear of heights with exposure therapy, it was time to start creating the game.

The Game

The game was called Happy Heights and the player starts off in a valley, presses play, then is slowly elevated in an elevator until a certain height.

“That kind of sounds like a tourture machine if the person is afraid of heights.” - Sean Korma (Mentor)

It was like a torture machine, but we had already spent so much time just figuring out how to get the headset working, unity working, learning unity etc. that we decided to call it good for that and work on other parts of the project. Once the player reaches a certain height, they are teleported on top of a skyscraper where they can move around and are instructed to move to the edge of the building and look down to pass the level. By the time we were done implementing this, we only had time to develop an ending scene. So thats what we did and with not much time left to spare, it was the third day and judges started to show up.

The Judging

Our presentation

We only had 7 mins to fit 3 days of work into, so we had to move fast. Not many of the people on Unreal Haptics knew how to code, so they worked on the presentation for a while. The presentation saved us, we knew our game was could not compete with the people who knew Unity coming into this, so our presentation and team spirit really helped us.

Results

After our team had presented to all of the judges, we waited for about 45 mins until they had decided on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place teams. When they announced that Unreal Haptics had won 3rd place, I was astonished. I did not think we were going to win anything. In the picture above you can see all of Unreal Haptics with the coordinator on the far right side. We all look pretty awake, but atleast I was very sleep deprived at that point.

Conclusion

This hackathon was the first time that I really worked together with people on a big project. Brett (far left in the picture) and I sat next to each other in front of the computer for hours trying to figure out countless errors. But also the sprint style of development was interesting, I’m not saying that sprinting through a project is a good way to work, but sprinting through this project was fun because I probably wouldn’t have learned any Unity or C-sharp if it wasn’t for this hackathon. I think everyone should try a hackathon because you can learn a lot about how you learn and about working with people in person for long periods of time. It was a great overall experience and I am looking forward to participating again next year.