Virtual Reality Application

360Belfast

360Belfast is a virtual reality app that allows users to discover Belfast’s famous landmarks and learn about their past through 360 photographs and detailed 3D Models.

About

360Belfast is a virtual reality (VR) tourism app that allows users to explore Belfast’s many famous landmarks. The user can look through the lens of their VR headset and see high quality 360° photographs or they can interact with a high quality 3D model of each of the landmarks.

The app itself is intended to be educational so each location offers background information on each location through audio clips, this allows more accessibility for users overall.

Challenge

The goal of this project was to come up with a digital product that could provide a solution to a certain problem. I thought about using VR from the very start as it allowed me to learn a new skill and provided an opportunity to explore Belfast's history and culture.

At the beginning I thought about using Unity to build the app but I heard about a new framework called aFrame and it immediately caught my interest aswell as proved as challenge as I hadn't used it before so like learning boostrap or jekyll for the first time it was a new experience.

Solution

Instead of creating just another VR app, I looked at other apps similar to what I had in mind and I specifically looked at their key features, the issues they had and how I could improve it. What stood out to me was how much backtracking there was in a lot of the VR applications, I would often have to backtrack through multiple screens to get back to options screen. This obviously leads to a bad user experience, so I set my mind on improving this specific issue.

My solution was to create a menu bar within the app that would enable the user to access every part of the app from one menu. This menu would be included on every screen improving the overall user experience enabling quick traversal through the different screens. I went through many different interations and there are still improvements to be made but my solution works well and solves a key problem in existing VR apps.

Design in mind

As always I feel the design is a key part of any project, for 360belfast I created an entire brand including the logo, mockups, merchandise and a large scale isometric illustration of many of Belfast's famous landmarks including the Belfast City Hall, Harland and Wolff, ALbert Clock and Titanic Quarter.

As an avid illustrator, the majority of these designs were created in Adobe Illustrator, the isometric illustration took around a month to create and I'm very happy with the outcome.

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