Lab 3 - Personal Project Ergonomics & Optimization

Before you resume work on your project, you need a plan for what you’re actually going to work on. You’ll continue filling out your design document so you have a clear plan of action for this lab.

1. Pick up where you left off with your design document:

• Re-open the document you created during Lab 1 and continued working on during Lab 2.

2. Fill out Section 5 (Optimization & Publishing) of the document:

• List the ways you intend to make the user experience more comfortable or accessible.
• Write down the target performance metrics for your target device(s).
• Describe the lighting strategy you will implement.

3. (Optional) Add more specific details to your design document:

• Continue to fill out section 6 (Other features)
• Continue to fill out section 7 (Sketch)
• Continue to fill out section 8 (Timeline)

You should now have section 4 of your design document complete, providing direction for this lab where you will be implementing your app’s core functionality.

Before you begin optimizing your app and improving the user experience, it’s time to replace some of the basic assets with some real 3D art.

1. Browse assets on the Unity Asset Store:

• Go to assetstore.unity.com.
• Sign in to the Unity Asset Store.
• Search for “low poly” assets.

Tip: You can also filter by “Free”.

2. Import an asset pack you like:

• Select Add to My Assets > Open in Unity.
• From the Package Manager window, select Download.
• Select Import to add the assets to your project.

3. To create your own 3D models inside Unity using Probuilder:

• From the Package Manager window, install the Probuilder package.

4. Replace the basic shapes in your scene with custom or imported 3D art:

• Add the 3D models as child GameObjects of empty parent GameObjects in your scene.
• To achieve appropriate scale, adjust the scale of the child GameObject rather than the scale of the parent GameObject.
• As necessary, add colliders to your GameObjects to make them collide appropriately.
• As necessary, adjust the attach points of your GameObjects so that they are grabbed appropriately.
• If possible, try to use the same shaders to reduce draw calls.

Your scene should now look a lot nicer with some real 3D art.

Related resources:

• About Probuilder

You should take time to consider how comfortable and accessible your app will be. This will allow it to be enjoyed by as many people as possible and make sure fewer people are excluded from using your app due to design decisions you’ve made.

1. Make sure your app’s locomotion is as comfortable as possible:

• Follow the instructions in the Comfort and Accessibility tutorial.

2. Add settings and menu options that increase the accessibility of your app:

• Follow the instructions in the Comfort and Accessibility tutorial.

Your app should now be more comfortable and accessible, allowing it to be enjoyed by more people than it was before.

Now that the app is largely functional and has some real 3D assets, you can attempt to optimize your app’s performance to hit your target metrics.

1. Determine how your app is currently performing, including fps, draw calls (batches), and polycount (tris):

• Follow the instructions in the Optimization tutorial.

2. Reduce polycount (tris):

• Follow the instructions in the Optimization tutorial, including replacing high-poly assets with lower-poly ones.

3. Reduce draw calls (batches):

• Follow the instructions in the Optimization tutorial, including marking GameObjects as static and using shared materials.

4. Improve jagged lines with anti-aliasing:

• Follow the instructions in the Optimization tutorial.

5. Quickly experiment with changes to your app’s performance:

• Locate the UniversalRenderPipelineAsset and tweak its settings to see what has an impact.

You should now have an understanding of how your app is performing and, if it’s performing poorly, what the cause of that poor performance might be. You shouldn’t be discouraged if your frames per second is still too low, though, since you haven’t yet optimized lighting.

Related resources:

• Olly’s seven stages of optimizations for mobile VR
• Optimizing your VR/AR Experiences
• Reduce rendering work on the CPU or GPU

In VR, performance is critical to the user experience, and lighting is one of the biggest components of performance. In order to optimize performance for VR, baking most of the lighting is highly recommended, using a minimal number of real-time or mixed lights.

1. Add and bake environmental lighting in your scene:

• Follow the instructions in the Lighting tutorial.

2. Improve realtime lighting with mixed lights and light probes:

• Follow the instructions in the Lighting tutorial.

You should now have baked lighting in your scene with realtime effects on dynamic GameObjects from mixed lights and light probes.

The final step before building a version of an app that you would consider sharing or publishing is double-checking that you’re using all of the recommended build settings for your target platform.

1. Confirm that your app’s project settings are following best practices for VR:

• Follow the instructions in the Building and Sharing tutorial, including Player settings, Quality settings, Build settings, Render Pipeline Asset properties, and Lighting and Shadow settings.

2. Build a version of your app that can be shared or published:

• Follow the instructions in the Building and Sharing tutorial.

You should now have a built app, ready for distribution, following all best practices for build settings.

New functionality:

• New art
• Improved comfort and accessibility
• Optimized key metrics
• Improved, baked lighting
• Built app

New concepts and skills:

• Optimizing and publishing your own VR app.

Next lab:

• Next steps and the rest of your VR development life!

We would love to see what you've created with VR!

If you went above and beyond in your VR room, the challenge, or your personal project for this Unit, please take a screenshot of your project or do a screen-recording walking us through it, then post it here to share what you’ve made. You can take screenshots within the Unity Editor or try to capture footage directly from the device.

We highly recommend that you comment on at least one other creator's submission. What do you like about the project? What would be a cool new feature they might consider adding?

Additional resources on capturing footage directly from an Oculus device:

• Screenshots and video capture on Oculus devices
• Transferring files to and from Oculus devices

Note:

• Oculus devices cannot currently capture the microphone input during video recordings, but the app’s audio is recorded.
• Due to the variable refresh rate in videos, recorded audio will likely be out of sync from the video footage. To sync the audio and video perfectly, you may need to edit them in a video editing program.