Let’s VR: A Multiplayer Framework for Virtual Reality

Virtual reality is an ever-growing market that provides an immersive and interactive experience. With the predicted growth of this market, we wanted to meet future demands by creating a multiplayer framework for virtual reality devices, specifically for the HTC Vive. The main objective of this project was to create a framework for other game developers that facilitates the simple creation of a multiplayer virtual reality environment. Setup in a plug and play style, this framework allows engineers to focus more on the actual mechanics of their application rather than tedious networking details. To demonstrate the use of the framework, we developed a virtual reality multiplayer game that involves player-to-player interaction. The game is setup like a first-person shooter, where the cooperating players fight off multiple waves of enemies. As the game progresses, the number of enemies increases as well as the difficulty of the enemies. Score is tracked individually and is tracked on a scoreboard. The game can be played in a single player experience, but emphasis is put on the multiplayer aspect to demonstrate the framework as well as user interactions. keywords: Networked Multiplayer, Peer to Peer, HCI, Software Engineering, HTC Vive, VR