In December of 2009, I went with Fraser Anderson to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. It was my first time out of North America and on an all-inclusive resort. Needless to say, much fun was had and the sun’s rays were enjoyed very much. I’m from Canada people, we only have summer for 4 months. While at our resort, the Baha Principe, I noticed that all of the buildings and architecture was uniform and the layout of the resort would make a wonderful setting for a spatial navigation experiment (I know I am nerdy thinking about these things on vacation).Once I got back to Edmonton, the winter semester was starting (at the time I was in the MSc program) and I was scheduled to take an independent study course with Dr. Walter F. Bischof. The purpose of this course was for me to explore virtual reality software and the difficulties inherent in creating virtual environments for psychological applications.

As my final project, I worked with Maya (3D modelling software) as well Virtools (a virtual reality behavior and deployment suite). One of my final deliverables for the course was a 3-D Caribbean virtual resort.  I based the layout and architectural elements in the 3-D world after the resort that I had been to in the Dominican Republic. While the resort may seem like a toy or trivial environment, I designed following many of the principles that are used to design navigation and way-finding studies and also added in support to gather user metrics (which are used to facilitate understanding about human way-finding behavior).

Although the 3-D models might not be the greatest, I was quite happy with the end result. My virtual resort is rather large, with lots of Carribean-ish items and can be viewed on a monitor, HMD, or in a CAVE. As it requires the Virtools software for deployment, the pictures below gives a brief look at the resort. You can also see the 19MB video on YouTube here or below:

One of the cool things about this project was that Fraser took one of the 3D models that I created in Maya of a lawn chair and had it 3D printed for me!