Student Assistant work at DLR

Development of a VR application for a research project

02/2025 - ongoing

Programming, Game Design, Testing & Art

Unreal Engine with C++ and Blueprints

7

More info coming soon

Description

My Student Assistant work at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) during my Game Design studies. I developed VR environments for one, soon two, research project including AI. I did most of the programming and scene building work as the other team members did more of the AI, art and organizational work.

Story

I work as part of the institute for AI safety at the DLR where we among other things research collaborative work between AI and humans, for example in assembly work.

Gameplay and Features

In the application the player is working together with an robot, that is later supposed to be controlled via AI, to solve different tasks in a virtual reality environment, like sorting objects into different crates.

Workflow

I was mainly working on the VR gameplay, game loop and player controls. The rest of the team was creating the environments, robot AI and models.

Key takeaways

I learned a lot about VR development in Unreal Engine, especially in cooperation with other developers. I also learned a bit about animating in Unreal Engine, optimizing environments and code, and C++ development in Unreal Engine.

Improvements

The main point I would improve are the physics. Carrying items inside of other items, like cubes in a crate, made the items inside jump out unpredictably, especially in connection with teleporting the player or the robot movement. The solution we landed on for now is that items get attached to the crate when inside and can only be detached by grabbing and removing them from the crate. This is fine for the simulation but is of course not realistic. We are still evaluating different methods.

Info on documentation

Code and Videos are coming soon. Confidentiality is still being discussed.