Assignment #Project 3 Proposal

For the third project I want to take advantage of Virtual Reality in order to develop an application I started to create a couple of years ago: RoomPathY. You can see a detailed description of this application in the following website: RoomPathY

In few words Roompathy is an intelligent environment that adapts itself following your personal emotions.
Imagine a room that collects your physical information, such as heartbeat, and creates your psychological profile asking some simple questions through a web application. Then it modifies the environment around you with lights adjustment and soundscape creation.
So, for example, if you got angry, the system will try to turn itself into a happier and relaxing environment. Furthermore, after each session you can interact with the application and give some feedback in order to improve the next ones.
Roompathy may be naturally useful to anyone already in therapy for emotive issues or anxiety as an additional helping factor, but we also recommend it as a way to just improve your living at home by setting it up in a specific room inside your house.

In the original project we used a real room connecting a Raspberry to some speakers and to the Philips Hue lights in order to change color and sound of the environment. Those were the main limitations: the hardware is expensive (especially the lights), it has to be adapted to each room, it’s difficult to set correctly the light color we want because the room could be not totally isolated.

Here comes the power of Virtual Reality and my idea of porting this project into a Virtual Room instead than a Real one. I want to create a smartphone application that can works properly even with a simple cardboard and can be used by the when needed. He doesn’t have to spend a lot of money in hardware, he doesn’t need to set it correctly in a room, he doesn’t need to be in a specific place in order to use it. He only need his smartphone and a cardboard.

Differences with the original project and improvements:
- The original project was realized in the real world with real lights and real speakers, was difficult to set up and expensive. The VR version is made completely in Virtual Reality, it can be set up easily, it doesn't need expensive hardware, can be replicated easily (just download applications in different devices) and is more portable.
- In doing the original project we chose carefully melodies of audio in order to let the user feel better, so I will take the same audio assets from that project. I will work on put audio sources in the best way.
- I want to create at least 2 different VR environments, can add more if I have time.
- In the original project the emotion of the user was evaluated only with some questions and the HR was a feedback of how went the session. Here I want to use VivoTronix (the developers can give me that for testing) to evaluate HR and change at runtime colors and sounds according to the HR (after applying some algorithms to obtain information from it). I've found a library on the Unity asset store that for 20$ gives me the possibility to use the bluetooth connection of an Android smartphone and communicate with a bluetooth device (VivoTronix in my case)
- If I have time I would also add the possibility to move inside this environment with a joystick/wand (I can do it with the wand included in my GearVR for Note8).