Amazon Sumerian CoreVR Toolkit

Amazon Sumerian is a web-based 3D content creation tool that helps its users create VR experiences quickly. The goal of the CoreVR Toolkit is to provide sets of interaction scripts and assets that our customers can and would want to use straight out of the box to complete their VR projects. The scripts work consistently across different platforms including those with 3DOF and 6DOF controllers and are optimized for the most lightweight HMDs such as the Oculus Go.

The CoreVR Toolkit covers VR principles including locomotion [teleport], object interaction [grab for 3DOF and 6DOF controllers and pointer/selection], and input feedback that are useful for enterprise use cases such as interactive employee training and 360 videos of site tours. We used the light as the metaphor to show affordance on objects and to highlight feedbacks from user inputs since we've found in our test scenes that emissive elements stand out across different art styles. The tenet for CoreVR is that the user interaction gives life to objects using animations and that "it just works" in terms of ease of setup and that it behaves as a user expects based on existing successful VR applications. Each interaction pattern has a default button assignment that follows the most common mapping for all supported platforms including Google Daydream devices, HTC Vive, Oculus Go, and Oculus Rift. We open sourced the scripts with documentation so that developers can extend the scripts and artists can customize the assets to craft unique interaction modes. Our hope was to lighten the load of development effort for our customers whose users may have different devices than what they have developed on.

My role As the resident VR developer on the Amazon Sumerian team, I led the visual and interaction designs including implementation details for optimization as we are targeting mobile browser experiences. I worked with the art director to determine the appropriate fidelity for art and interaction design details to optimize the rendering overhead and thus minimize VR sickness. I researched precedents for visual design, interaction patterns, button mapping conventions, and implementation techniques as well as collaborated with the UX designer who conducted user research. I also created several prototypes to test different concepts for each of teleport, grab, and pointer interactions and then implemented production code.

Contact Please contact the Amazon Sumerian team for any questions related to Amazon Sumerian.

Amazon Sumerian | 2018

Programming LanguagesJavaScript