Immersive Site
Near the beginning of 2020, I started dedicating freetime towards creating a 3D virtual venue space for myself and some friends. During this time, I explored services like Photon for Unity multiplayer development, then eventually NodeJS and TypeScript so I could write something myself. I became very interested in recreating or perhaps even evolving larger events that would typically be occurring in physical spaces, but digitally. The thought of creating a virtual venue I’m sure excited many like myself around the beginning of quarantine, and I used that excitement to learn how to make one. This evolved into me prototyping and pitching a virtual venue project for Midwest Immersive. We called this prototype the Immersive Site, which was a long term project that I researched and developed for around 7 months, before having to shift focus to other projects.
Description:
The Immersive Site was a general use virtual platform I was developing for Midwest Immersive. It’s a website that runs a Unity WebGL instance, as well as some extra JS code for better communication with other users. The Immersive Site’s use cases are wide - it could be used for a digital festival, a business convention, a digital office space, or even just as a hangout area. My goal with the project was to make something that could scale to as many users as possible - while running in a browser. Another goal was to keep it as a 3D first person experience. There are other platforms that manage to scale pretty far, but little are first person.
The most polished area of the Immersive Site, running in Google Chrome.
My Role:
I led the design and development of the Immersive Site. For most of my time with it, I was the only person working on it - which means that I handled code, design, UI, sound, visuals, etc (though later on more people joined the team and helped with backend development and visual polish).
Why it’s important:
A goal I had with the Immersive Site was to make something that helped people interact with each other. In a time where human-to-human communication was more important than ever, I couldn’t wait to travel and see friends in real life again at meetups and festivals. The Immersive Site wasn’t created as a cure-all solution for not having real life events - it was designed to fill a gap that had appeared. To encourage this human-to-human communication, we had versions that included different styles of voice and video chat. For example, one iteration put users in a video call together when their characters got close to each other in the app.
The Immersive Site was also a huge exploration into backend development for myself. If mass was a chance for me to practice developing web services and backend code, then the Immersive Site was a chance for me to see how far I could go with the skills that I had developed. It led to me developing a strong preference for TypeScript over pure NodeJS, it led to me becoming familiar with Amazon Web Services (beyond just using S3 and EC2), and it led to me learning a lot about how hard it is to architect a web service optimally.
The entrance Hub inside the Immersive Site.
