— PROJECT NAME

Working at Height Training VR @ Sonovision UK


— ROLE

Lead Unity Developer


— COLLABORATORS

Arthur Dukes (3D Artist)

Dan Gilbert (Unity Developer)

This VR project focused on delivering training to Laing O'Rourke's employees to convey the safety and necessity of safety equipment while working at height.


I maintained the project and tasks at hand utilising source control and JIRA to maintain an efficient workflow for our team.


The project utilised Unity, Unity's XR Interaction Toolkit and Photon multiplayer in order to create a Virtual Reality experience where users can join rooms and complete tasks regarding Working at Height in a safe and secure scenario.


This project also made the final of the Building Innovation Awards 2022 for 'Best use of AR/VR in a Construction Project'!


Working with the 3D Artist, it was necessary to make sure we set a limit on polygon, texture and draw call count for the environment which ended up with a lot of assets sharing the same material so we could utilise Unity’s culling methods efficiently and get a higher framerate on wireless VR devices. Combining this with baked lighting, the environment features a simple yet sleek design for users to move around with a very close shape and likeness to that of the original environment it was referenced from.

Unity’s XR Toolkit tends to fight with joints and Photon’s multiplayer system, but I managed to fix a lot of the issues by editing and introducing parameters to make the physics work together and not conflict. Notably, joints tended to over-exert or not do anything which caused physics issues over the network.


In a majority of cases, the Photon issues required a few more networking calls [PunRPC] and tracking to send over the network so all users can see a system that replicates reality.

The project required an interactable MEWP vehicle which worked inside of VR for one of the steps inside this training. We started by created a basic idea of it using cubed and a dashboard utilising basic VR levers. Once the model had been completed in pieces, we replaced the cubes with these elements and created further detailed VR interactions for the levers, buttons and dials on the MEWP to move and adjust the vehicle based on the position of these interactions.