Glenn van Waesberghe Researcher Game Tech & AI

During the last year of my studies at at Digital Arts and Entertainment, I worked on a group project that focussed on creating a multiplayer VR rowing game. The goal was to create a VR game for HTC Vive that could be controlled using a rowing exercising machine. We worked with the Flemish Rowing Federation to figure out what type of game would be interesting for different audiences, both hardcore rowers training for competitions, and casual enthusiasts at the gym. Ultimately, we decided to create an assortment of different game modes, including a single player rowing mode, a more arcade-style co-op rowing game, a tug-of-war mode set in the arctic, and a co-operative game set in a mine where players had to stabilize a platform to collect valuables. The project was realized in Unreal Engine with both C++ and Blueprints, and we made a custom reader to access the rowing machine’s current states. Personally, my main focus was on some of the general rowing implementations, the water shader, networking, and the mine-platform gamemode.