Like the headline implies, been feeling like I’ve been stuck in the longest traffic jam known to mankind.  Side work has taken a lot of my dev hours – 4 paintings and a logo will do that to even the most unencumbered man.

I have had the fortune of joining a dev Slack that centers around a set of tools for VR creation. The VRTK Group has been amazing in their support, ideas, helpful suggestions, weird humor (heck, I even got an amazing voice-over line from one of the devs)

The other, not so great thing about this group is that its impacting my wallet. I just found out about Final IK, and amazing rigging tool that just added VR support. When the Slack members started passing around this video:

I just about freaked out, because this kind of player controlled interaction would be PERFECT for my BUM experience. I could use some of the VRTK scripts for grabbing objects, I could have the player control the homeless person, grab a cup, and if I get the input from the controller, make a change rattle sound & trigger NPC’s walking nearby to either drop a coin or make a disparaging remark.

Now, before I get too far ahead of myself – I’m still stuck at getting the Final IK solution to work – as you can see by the video below, it looks like the player is swinging from a Jungle Gym:

not to mention that from the VR vantage point, the player is seeing the inside of the avatars head. Not overly selling the idea, but yet again – one step closer.