VR Buzz Cafe, made for Horizons 2023
With the overall theme of this year’s Horizons hackathon being “Sketchbook Cafe”, we were inspired to make our own sketchbook cafe themed around Georgia Tech’s own mascot, Buzz. Our cafe is full of decorations that can provide players with enough inspiration to fill their page!
Players are placed in the BuzzCafe with a sketchpad, pencil, eraser, and bagel. They may traverse the cafe, watch Buzz hard at work, admire elegant artwork, and make their own masterpieces. The sketchpad allows players the freedom to draw anything they’d like.
The project was built using the VR features found within the Unity game engine. 3D models were designed in Blender. We used the Logic Pro X DAW to compose BuzzCafe’s music.
We spent a few hours implementing the Quest 2’s hand-tracking feature into our project, but found that it conflicted with the core sketching feature when in use.
The core gameplay feature of the project, sketching, ended up being shockingly smooth and intuitive to use even for those members of our group that were not acclimated to VR. We also composed a soundtrack to play in the background of BuzzCafe using Logic X Pro. We’re very proud of this part of the project as we worked hard to create a song that would fit the nature of the cafe and feature an upbeat vibe. Additionally, around 90% of assets in the project are original 3D models created solely for this project.
This was the first hackathon for every member of our team, so it was incredibly useful as a means to develop both a deadline-oriented and cooperative approach to projects. We all came in with slightly different areas of expertise from VR development to 3D modeling to music composition and we were able to learn a lot from each other.
Youtube - https://youtu.be/KfybJq5XZYg