About the Customer:
Our customer is one of the renowned Virtual Reality (VR) gaming companies based in the USA. The customer has developed numerous virtual reality escape rooms for people to witness larger-than-life multi-player VR games on the cloud.
The Company intends to grant greater access to VR by pairing cloud computing capabilities with immersive content.
Business Challenges:
Our customer had a brick-and-mortar store prior to the pandemic. Post-pandemic they wanted to opt for online services and reach out to their users across the state and country. They were looking for an intuitive and user-friendly site for better connectivity with the new and existing users.
They were also looking for a technology partner with VR competency who would help them execute this project successfully and boost their product/services portfolio.
How Does it Work?
- Escape Rooms: Authorized users are allowed into the customer’s game lobby which loads into the VR headset (preferably Meta Quest 2 – an immersive all-in-one VR headset) of the user to experience virtually. This experience is developed in-house by the customer and is called “Abstract”. Abstract is the world’s first-ever cloud-based VR game streaming service. In partnership with Amazon AWS, NVIDIA, and EverGrow Coin, they are able to bring a dynamic VR space with all the social connections and competitive gaming of a brick-and-mortar VR arcade to the comfort of a home. The UI is designed for the VR headset.
- Arcade: Based on the allocated time, users get access to play a real online game.
Embitel’s Solution:
With our patent-pending compression algorithm, we built a cloud-based platform that gives users access to high-end VR games, escape rooms, and simulations anywhere with minimal latency, high refresh rates, and no expensive hardware required.
Two apps were developed by our team including ITC, full stack developers and QA for customer’s VR:
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- The Abstract VR app:
This application provides a user interface to fetch the data that is required for the user to play games.Workflow:
- The user will book a slot on a website. Once they get the slot with the email id, he/she needs to login to Meta Quest.
- Once the user opens the application in Meta Quest, there will be two options to enter in play mode.
- Users have to enter the email id that they used on the website for booking.
- After the user submits the email id, it will check the slot data in AWS S3 bucket.
- AWS S3 bucket is the place where the users’ data and instance ids are stored. With email id, the slot data can be fetched for a particular user.
- Once data is received from the AWS S3 bucket, the timer will start (if there is time left for the user to start playing the game).
- Once the timer has reached the point where the “Launch Game” button appears on the screen, he/she can hit the button and play the streaming game.
- In case the user is not able to fetch the slot data, there is one more option available where they can enter the IP address manually and hit submit button to start the streaming game.
- Abstract Steamer app:
This is a native Android application where the user receives the IP address and connects it with the Cloud XR server.Workflow:
- Once a user hits the play button in the Abstract VR, IP data is sent to Abstract Steamer.
- When Abstract Steamer receives the IP Address it will send IP to CloudXR client SDK.
- The CloudXR SDK will connect CloudXR server with the received IP Address.
- On the other end, a server has to be started with NICE DCV Client.
- Once the connection is established, the user can start playing streaming games.
- The Abstract VR app:
The Scope here includes integrating the VR Headset with the AWS cloud to retrieve the user’s credentials. These credentials are used to validate and authorize logging into online gaming instances.
The offline VR (called Abstract) experience is hosted and managed by the customer. The entire gaming experience is developed on the UNITY platform. The gaming app is cast and integrated with the VR devices’ UI which runs on Android.
Embitel Impact:
Our team of digital experts was committed to understanding the entire project architecture, building the UI for VR headset and APK, integrating with offline ‘Abstract’ content, and merging the APIs for social apps such as Facebook and Google. There has been a consistent rise in user engagement for the client ever since cloud computing and integration. Both online and offline services are availed in huge numbers.
Tools and Technologies:
Tech Stack:
- Cloud hosting – AWS
- Platform – UNITY
- VR Device – Meta Quest 2
- Tech partner – NVidia
- UI/UX – Android platform
- Language – C++, Python
- Version Control – Bitbucket, Plastic SCM
- Code Scanning – Android Lint
- Reports – Trello, Discord
