The business approached ATI2 with a project that aimed to make VR/AR characters more reactive and realistic, something which would enhance the gaming experience for the user.
Katie Goode, Creative Director at Triangular Pixels, explains the problem “to push, hug and interact with characters in immersive media – developers have always had to use large ‘collision’ boxes. For traditional games, that’s been a fair estimation but for VR, AR and much more immersive games and media, you need to be much more accurate as users can move their hands anywhere and push in any way possible”.
The current and basic ‘collision’ boxes used by developers in the VR/AR gaming industry often appear like a “forcefield” with a wide berth around the character said Katie, whilst she spoke about her innovation project at ATI2’s Celebrating Innovation event.
The result? The character within the game reacts as soon as a user comes into contact with the forcefield, as opposed to the character, and creates an unrealistic and unnatural experience – the opposite of what you’re trying to create within a virtual reality world.
“As developers, what we needed was time to think about the problem and test the possible solutions. The project with ATI2 gave us that time”, she said.
The bespoke business innovation support provided by Michael Robertson, their Business Innovation Advisor, included various strategy sessions and one-to-one meetings, to explore possible pricing structures and embraced specialist innovation tools, such as the business modelling canvas.
“The way ATI supported our business really suited how we worked. It gave our developers the ability to have time to think about our problem. With that we created various innovative prototypes as solutions and developed the best solution for our business as a successful commercial product available all over the world,” she explained.
Their Business Innovation Advisor also assisted with their application for funding support, to enable the prototyping and development of their gaming solution, and Triangular Pixels were awarded a grant from the innovation fund to help them develop their product.
As an outcome of the innovation project and ATI2 support, Triangular Pixels have created a tool which developers can purchase on the licence to enable them to quickly mark up a “skinned mesh collision box” with precise accuracy and in a matter of clicks.
“The funding from ATI2 allowed Triangular Pixels to create tools which help developers to incredibly quickly markup super accurate collision on characters, enabling a much more realistic, natural and immersive experience”, she says.
Their developer tool, named Technie Collider Creator 2, is now available for sale online via the Unity Asset Store and has been highly rated and favourited by its users.
“It’s really exciting to see a tool developed here in Cornwall being used by developers all the way over in Japan, who are creating these how-to YouTube videos about our solution”, beams Katie.
