For the 2022 edition of Laval Virtual, we took part in the festival’s Hackathon. The goal was to propose a VR solution in response to the theme of “Desirable Energy Sobriety”.
Before explaining our development process and the solution we came up with, here’s a quick overview of what a Hackathon is and what this edition’s theme meant.
A Hackathon is a time-limited competition, often 48 hours, where teams must collaboratively propose a solution to a given problem. The solution typically combines innovation and technology. Here, around ten teams of 4 to 5 students in programming or game design competed with the goal of responding to the theme in an innovative way using VR.
“Desirable Energy Sobriety” means making it appealing to change one’s lifestyle in order to reduce energy consumption.
We chose to approach the theme through the lens of an interactive city puzzle. The player must evolve the city to stay below the commune’s CO2 budget limit. To do so, they can renovate, build, demolish, or relocate. Buildings have effect zones that make them more or less polluting or efficient. The goal is to make life pleasant while achieving meaningful energy sobriety, with as few actions as possible.
To support the VR experience, several concepts were designed: an environment that evolves based on the player’s actions, and the ability to place buildings freely using hand motion controllers.
We built everything on Unity, collaborating with tools like Fork.
To wrap things up: our solution wasn’t selected by Laval Festival, but we remain proud of our work. It was a great experience with VR.