VR | BUCK Holiday VR Party

Even though you are consciously aware that you're in a virtual world, the reptile part of your brain isn't. This creates a sense of presence and explains why VR works so well for things that are hard to convey via chest-up 2D video chat

VR also helps us regain things lost by not being in the office together:

• Watercooler moments of social connection
• Trust-building
• Work/life/home balance
• New creative opportunities

We chose to build this experience using the Altspace SDK in Unity because it gave us the fastest path to creating a multiplayer environment that could scale.

With a tight deadline, we needed a platform that already handled the essentials: networking, avatars, user identity, and cross-platform support. This way, we could focus on the creative and interactive aspects of the project. Instead of spending weeks building and debugging custom infrastructure, we were able to get an interactive social space online quickly and reliably.

At the same time, Altspace’s pre-built systems allowed us to support large groups of players without reinventing the wheel. While there are limits to how many people can be in one space simultaneously, its infrastructure made it possible to accommodate hundreds of participants across rooms while keeping the experience smooth. This approach let us balance scalability with speed of development, ensuring that the project was not only delivered on time but also capable of hosting the kind of multi-network interactions it was designed for.

We wanted the environment to feel positive, warm, and playful.

In the early sketch phase, we discovered that we loved filling the virtual world with warm, all-encompassing, undulating gradients. We also did a lot of experimenting with soft forms and structures.

Using saturated gradients as a sky-scape and a sculpture garden of playful shapes and iconic Buck characters, we focused on feelings of optimism and fun as we continued to explore.

As mentioned previously, using Altspace SDK came with many technical limitations, but we were able to think outside the box and be truly creative with our solutions.

Unity Shaders (HSLS) to Altspace

Although Altspace does not support Unity scripts, it does support written shaders. Shaders were super handy when we needed custom animated textures for object materials. Shaders were essential to creating the animated gradient look we were going for. Keep in mind that Altspace does NOT support shadergraph, so any shaders (both vertex & fragment) must be written using ShaderLab or HLSL in Unity. Altspace supports the default Unity rendering pipeline, but not URP or HDRPShaders.

However, not all shaders are supported in Altspace. Since shaders work differently on PC and Android, a lot of shaders aren't compatible on Android and VR, which is what Altspace is built with. Simple shaders without heavy computation (including blur) are preferred as we noticed complex shaders have a higher possibility of breaking in Altspace or affecting performance. According to their discord, mobile diffuse and mobile unlit are great shaders to use for AltspaceVR, the standard shader is a little too heavy for mobile use.

Here are shaders we made for the lamps, water and animated gradient shader for the environment: