WW1 VR Experience

What it is

A VR experience recreating World War I battlefields, built in Unity for Alvin C. York State Park in Tennessee. Sergeant York was one of the most decorated American soldiers of the war and the park preserves his story, so the goal was to let visitors walk through the kind of environment he fought in instead of reading about it on a sign.

The project won the Distinguished Design Award at the end-of-semester showcase.

What I built

I designed and implemented the virtual environments, the battlefield terrain and the trench networks along the front lines.

Trenches are narrow and enclosed, which makes them harder to do in VR than they look. Moving through tight spaces causes motion sickness for a lot of people, and the low sightlines make it easy to lose track of where you are. Most of the work went into tuning scale, sightlines, and movement so the space stayed accurate without being uncomfortable to walk through.

Working with a stakeholder

This was a six-person team with an external stakeholder and a fixed deadline, run with sprint planning, daily stand-ups, and regular reviews with the park.

The reviews were the part that mattered. Historical accuracy was the park’s priority, and there were details about the terrain and the trench layout we would have gotten wrong on our own. Checking in often meant we caught those early, before they were built into the environment and expensive to change.