From Expectations to Execution: Understanding Resource Allocation and Multidisciplinary Challenges in Developing a VR Biking Simulation
Ravindran, Omkaranathan (2025)
2025
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Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2025053018598
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2025053018598
Tiivistelmä
Virtual Reality (VR) offers researchers experimental control that fields studies cannot match, yet the literature in the area rarely reveals the practical aspects of building a VR system in research settings. This thesis documents the end-to-end development of GREENTRAVELVR: a Virtual Reality cycling simulation developed for the University of Helsinki’s Digital Geography Lab to assist in studying how urban greenery and seasonality affects people during active travel. The system combines state-of-the-art Virtual Reality hardware with a physical bike enabling the participants to bike through hyper-realistic urban street environments with diverse greenery and seasonality settings.
The central focus of the study is 'what-it-takes', explaining the resources required in terms of technology, time and expertise to create such systems. It also captures the perspective of the non-technical research team members on how they estimate such efforts and how these estimates match actual development times. The study used a mixed methods approach combing data sources such as (i)development effort, time logs and component inventory, (ii) an estimation survey completed by non-technical project members to capture different aspects of the development project and (iii) the author’s experience and observations a participant.
The results show that content production and associated efforts building the five distinct environments, consumed the largest portion of development effort, surpassing the time spent on programming. Extensive background research, asset acquisition and preprocessing, lack of dedicated 3D content creators, and iterative level design significantly contributed to this. The study also highlights the challenges in multi-disciplinary collaboration and how project outcomes can be affected by factors such as communication barriers and misaligned expectations. The detailed breakdown and derived estimates provide a transferable baseline for future research groups undertaking such efforts with limited in-house VR expertise.
The central focus of the study is 'what-it-takes', explaining the resources required in terms of technology, time and expertise to create such systems. It also captures the perspective of the non-technical research team members on how they estimate such efforts and how these estimates match actual development times. The study used a mixed methods approach combing data sources such as (i)development effort, time logs and component inventory, (ii) an estimation survey completed by non-technical project members to capture different aspects of the development project and (iii) the author’s experience and observations a participant.
The results show that content production and associated efforts building the five distinct environments, consumed the largest portion of development effort, surpassing the time spent on programming. Extensive background research, asset acquisition and preprocessing, lack of dedicated 3D content creators, and iterative level design significantly contributed to this. The study also highlights the challenges in multi-disciplinary collaboration and how project outcomes can be affected by factors such as communication barriers and misaligned expectations. The detailed breakdown and derived estimates provide a transferable baseline for future research groups undertaking such efforts with limited in-house VR expertise.