虎扑电竞

A team of students from Tohoku University's 虎扑电竞 Institute of Electrical Communication (RIEC) has won two company awards at the final of the International Collegiate Virtual Reality Contest (IVRC) in Tokyo.

The students' project, titled "Be Bait!" offers users the experience of being a fishing bait, swimming in the sea and eventually being eaten by a large fish. To achieve the sensation of swimming, users lie across two hammocks and swing their body to create the swimming motion. A tracker is then used as a sensor to move the user forward in the virtual sea.

Although the team did not win the IVRC's top prizes, it received two of the seven "company awards" given out by the event's sponsors to recognize achievements in specific areas.

One was the Unity Technologies Award for having excellent content using Unity software.

"By making full use of Unity's shader programme, we were able to create an elaborate virtual world, especially with the underwater lighting and the GPU-boid fishes," said team member Yuki Onishi, a first year Masters student. "We got a lot of feedback that our virtual sea world was very attractive, and that the hammocks made the swimming motion easy."

The team also received the Dospara Award from the well-known computer specialty store. The prize was the latest in graphic boards which would allow the computer to display high quality graphical scenes. "We actually created high quality graphics, but the computer we used didn't have enough spec," Onishi said, laughing. "I think Dospara gave us the award because they felt sorry for us and thought we needed it the most!"

IVRC has been held annually since 1993 and is closely associated with Laval Virtual in France, the biggest VR event in Europe. It encourages students to act on their creative ideas, and teams are judged on their innovation, their understanding of interactive technology and the impact of their projects.

This year's final was held during the Digital Content Expo in Tokyo from November 14 - 16.