Aurecon was tasked with building road infrastructure, apart of this was the inclusion of cyclists in these projects. This started as a novel idea however turned into a strong design and community engagement tool. The bike was developed for the Sydney branch to test a variety of cycle related projects. I was tasked with the creation of the Unity framework and the bike controller itself to enable a virtual bike to ride through our visualization scenes.
Testing cycling infrastructure across Australia
The framework was particularly challenging as the bike needed to act like a bike, but also be usable and prohibit VR sickness long enough to gain incite to the design. My journey started to make develop all the functions of a bike. my developer environment was a skate park, and a lot went into getting the movements just right. However testing showed VR Sickness pretty quick. Through agile refinement, elements were either tweaked or changed to make the player feel caged to the bike. This extended user times from less than a minute to 3~5 minutes, enough to allow users to experience the model as if they were riding for real.
Tapping into my skills 3D printing and electronics for repairing old consoles. I prototyped, refined and developed system that could be attached with any bicycle and trainer system through the use of the HTC Vive Tracker and PGIO pins. A big part of the design was scalability as someone with the 3D files and limited eletronics could create the system by following instructions packaged. This controller has been created for a variety of Aurecon offices around the globe.
Overall I am proud of this project, it has been commended by external stakeholders and the 2019 Australian Bicycle Summit. the bikes use through out Aurecon in their design process shows the potential for tools like this is the future of design.