HXRC Team: Encapsulating the Magic of Finnish Nature within VR

Text by Jenna Kärkkäinen and Samu Aikio

The goal was to develop a simulator application utilising virtual reality devices (Meta Quest 3/Pico 4/Varjo XR3), where tourists and people interested in Finnish nature are able to visit from anywhere. The purpose of the simulator is to reduce hesitation about going out into the wilderness and exploring the Finnish nature. The simulator takes the user in the middle of Nuuksio, a Finnish National Park located in Southern Finland, where the user can enjoy a relaxing rowboat trip on Kaitlampi, visit a mystical camping area filled with wildlife, learn about the different mushroom species found in Finnish forests, and visit a beautiful lake lodge cottage.

Trainee introduction: Samu Aikio

Heellou! I’m Samu Aikio, a Software Development student at Metropolia UAS. I started as a Game Developer trainee at Helsinki XR Center at the beginning of September 2024, and this project had a kick-off meeting three weeks later.

My role was to handle the design and development of the project within the Unity Game Engine, ensuring that the final result not only looks and works as intended, but is also a satisfying user experience.

Starting the development

We started the project by planning and designing it as a team of six, including Juho Puurunen, Janina Rannikko, Emmi Isokirmo, Jenna Kärkkäinen, Alma Hoque and myself. After a couple of workshops and design meetings, the backbone of the project was established. The plan was to create four scenes: a lobby room for the player to get the sense of the mökki (a Finnish cottage), a mini game for players to take part in Finnish nature activities, and two scenes where players can enjoy an immersive experience in the Finnish nature.

Lobby design ideation.

Prototypes for the lobby and the mini game.

Since one of the main goals of the project was to test how 360-degree materials could work with 3D environments and models in similar applications, we decided that we were going to use these assets to enhance the immersion of nature within our scenes. This was going to involve experimenting with 360-degree materials, as well as the combination of these materials with 3D models.

Facing the challenges of using 360-degree materials

After a few weeks of development, we went to Nuuksio to film 360-degree materials. It was our first experience filming with a 360-camera. Without any prior experience in using the camera, we found the filming quite challenging. Either the recording would not start even after double-checking, or the camera would turn off suddenly. Later in the editing process we realized that our footage was not as good as we had initially thought and needed to make a lot of adjustments for it to be usable in the simulator. Some of the 360-degree pictures and videos were over- and underexposed, and some of the videos had audio problems.

Despite the problems we had with the 360-degree materials, they ended up giving a much greater feel of realism than just a modeled environment. Especially the rowboat scene from Kaitlampi, it brings our minds back to that beautiful autumn day, and you are able to experience that same atmosphere that we did.

Boat trip on lake Kaitlampi and camera gear setup at the lake lodge cabin.

 After editing, we started to bring the material into the project, and that is when we faced our next problem – the scale of 360-degree materials. We recognized immediately that the material made the surrounding environment feel enormous from the user’s point of view. The materials were too large to be used effectively and when they were used it broke the feeling of realism that we were trying to achieve. We tried to solve this problem by creating a custom shader material to adjust the scale, but after a few tries we weren’t able to get major improvements and our time was running out.

After the first few builds we encountered the next problem – the size of the 360-degree materials! The files were huge and Gradle (Android build tool) immediately prevented us from building the APK, because its size was well over the limit of 4 GB.

After some research, we decided to split the main APK and use Unity’s Asset Bundle system to create OBB files for the videos and images, and inject them into the simulator via the Android OBB storage.

Testing 360-degree images for a skybox.

Mixing reality and imagination together

Have you ever heard someone describe a moose they saw by saying, “It was at least 3 meters tall!”, or the size of a mushroom that they found  “It was at least the size of a dog!” Or perhaps you’ve heard rumors that in Finland you might see a polar bear wandering around the capital area.

A moose in the final camping scene.

We have heard these stories too, and we believe them and we wanted to spice up our project with interesting elements that Finland has in reality, or could have in virtual reality. What could be a safer way to get close and see those great natural wonders with your own eyes than in a virtual world. This inspired us to mix a realistic environment with imaginary elements. 

At the moment of writing this blog post, I find myself thinking about how great it would be to experience Finnish folklore while exploring Finnish nature.  

Disclaimer! We could not get a polar bear, but we got very big ants instead. 

Lessons learned

This project was a wild ride through VR development for us, and the project was my first real experience developing a VR simulator application from scratch. Since this was the first large-scale VR project for Jenna and me, we had the opportunity to work with many different technologies for the first time. We got to test out various VR tools, from Meta’s Blocks to the Auto Hand plugin, among other tools and software development kits.  

We had a lot of freedom to design the app as we saw the best. During the development, there were occasionally moments that had us feeling overwhelmed and struck with indecision. Additionally, there was a lack of proper planning which caused features to keep evolving, and therefore made it difficult to implement everything within the time limits of the project. There were also some mechanics which I had implemented that were not as well received as I had anticipated, because they were seen as difficult to use.

A few final words about the testing process

After one tester crashed the program by bringing a mushroom from the minigame to the lobby, it sure was a funny moment, but I could feel the impending doom for the bugs that I was going to have to fix. At that moment I knew that there would not be a single feature that the testers could not break, and it felt great. Why? Because it pointed out problematic code and made me pay more attention to code quality, therefore making the inner working of the simulator more precise and bug free. 

Okay, to be honest, seeing your great feature crashing the app does not feel very nice either.

Conclusion

As the project progressed, more improvement suggestions and ideas emerged, but by that point we didn’t have the time to implement all of them. Naturally, the journey came with various bugs and technical issues during development, but in the end, we delivered a nice product that we can call “Luontotaitosimulaattori”. 

From start to finish this project taught me a lot. I was expecting to only grow as a programmer, but by the end of the project I had gained far more skills than what I first expected, from planning and managing a project to learning about optimisation, using a wide range of tools, as well as debugging/testing and interacting with coworkers and collaborators. I’m thankful for the skills I gained during this project and I hope to take them into my future projects. 

Thanks for the opportunity to work on this great project. And thanks to everyone who participated, especially Jenna, for the great collaboration!

To see previous news about our trainees’ projects, head over to the Trainee news section.

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