I started to get to know all the VR stuffs at the beginning of 2016 and I made a lot of demo applications. I went to several conferences and visited some companies doing VR in China. It’s a booming business. Then my friend and I came up to an idea to display real estate in VR, which can bring immersive experience, just like visiting houses and places in person. We found a lot of estate companies in China are still using model apartments to do this, which is both expensive and very hard to extend. By using such a VR-based system, not only can customers get to see vivid houses, but also they can switch from different room types and styles quickly. So we had this workshop and I’m the only programmer.

The idea is really intuitive, but one crucial problem is how to move the players? Samsung Gear VR, our equipment at that time, doesn’t have a tracker of your physical location. Also it’s kind of dumb to truly make people walk all the way around to see the entire thing, especially in a limited concrete space. So what I do is to split the whole estate into several scenes, which are actually Panoramic images, and place mark points in each of them. Players can then imitate they are 'walking' by gazing at these marks for few seconds to be transferred to another scene. The process is quick and natural. I take advantage of the brilliant 'gaze input' feature of VR in this case.

Everything is done by Unity3D. I’m still adding more features on this system right now, such as customized decoration and sand tables.

The git repositories of this project can be found here.

I'm also working on a few other VR/AR projects. Including a VR music player and an AR geometry displayer (can be combined with Natural Language Processing techniques). I am interested in using different VR devices such as Gear VR (with controller now), Google Daydream, PS VR, HTC Vive, Hololens and Fingo (uSens).