- Read motion controller input through OpenXR and drive interactions from it.
- Build a grabbable object with a grab component, with affordances that make it obviously grabbable.
- Treat audio as a spatial material: attenuation, spatialization, and reverb that describe the room.
- Bring a MetaHuman into a VR scene, and populate a space at crowd scale with MetaHuman Collections.
- Name the comfort and presence choices your project is making — on purpose.
2:00 · Brief What makes a space feel occupied
"Presence" is the word researchers use for the moment your nervous system accepts the virtual space as the one you're in. You can't script it directly. You earn it by getting hands, sound, and bodies right — and you lose it instantly when any of the three lies.
Hands are the interface
In VR there is no cursor. Your hands — tracked controllers standing in for them — are the entire input system. That makes grabbing the fundamental verb, and it's harder than it looks: where does the object snap in the hand? What happens when you let go? Does it have weight, or does it float like a screenshot? The VR template's grab component gets you 80% of the way; the last 20% — affordances, haptics, release behavior — is what separates a demo from a piece.
Audio is a spatial material
Close your eyes in any real room and you still know roughly how big it is and where the door is. Sound attenuation, spatialization, and reverb do that work in UE. Treat every sound source like you treat a light: it has a position, a falloff, and a job. A space with flat, unpositioned audio reads as fake even when the visuals are flawless — and the reverse is also true, which is the cheapest presence win available to you.
Other bodies
An empty world reads as an abandoned one. MetaHumans give you individual believable people; the new MetaHuman Collections in 5.8 are built for the crowd problem — many varied humans at a performance cost that doesn't destroy your VR frame budget. Even one seated figure changes the social temperature of a space. Decide deliberately whether your project's emptiness is a choice.
Presence, cybersickness, and spatial UI are active research frontiers — IEEE VR 2025's best-paper slate includes perception and locomotion work directly relevant to what you're building this week. Read one award paper's abstract and intro; bring one design implication to crit. Discussion: which comfort choices are settled science vs. still contested?
2:45 · Guided lab Hands, sound, people
We build in layers on top of last week's deployable project: first a hand that grabs, then a room that sounds like a room, then a body in the corner. Test in the headset after every layer — comfort bugs don't show up on the monitor.
- Motion controllers via OpenXR
Start from the VR template pawn (or your Project 3 pawn). In your pawn, confirm both motion controller components track, and print controller input events (trigger, grip) to screen so you can see the plumbing before you build on it.
- A grabbable object
Add a grab component to a small prop — mug, tool, artifact from your project. Test grab and release in the headset. Note the defaults: where it snaps, whether physics stays on when released.
- Affordances
Make it obviously grabbable before it's touched: a subtle highlight or outline on hover, sensible hand-scale size, placement within comfortable reach. If a playtester has to be told it's grabbable, the affordance failed.
- Haptics on contact
Fire a short controller haptic pulse on grab and a lighter one on release. Haptics are the cheapest weight simulator you have.
- Spatialize your audio
Give at least three sound sources in your scene positions and attenuation settings — a hum, a loop, an ambience. Then the blind test: headset on, eyes closed, have a neighbor rotate you. You should be able to point at each source.
- Reverb that matches the room
Add an audio/reverb volume sized to your space with settings that match its material and scale — a concrete stairwell and a carpeted bedroom should not sound the same. Walk between spaces and listen for the transition.
- A MetaHuman in the scene
Bring a MetaHuman into the project and place it doing something specific — seated, leaning, watching. An idle animation is fine; a T-pose is not.
- Crowd-scale with MetaHuman Collections
If your project wants more than one body, use MetaHuman Collections to populate at crowd scale. Then check
stat unitin the headset — bodies are expensive, and your VR frame budget from Week 10 still governs.
4:00 · AI lab Polish from a spec
This week's agent work starts with writing, not prompting: a short interaction spec, written like a design doc. Haptics, sound hooks, and grab affordances are exactly the kind of fiddly, many-small-edits work agents are good at — if the spec is precise enough to verify against.
Write the spec first — three minutes, plain English, testable claims. Then verify each line of the spec in the headset, not on the monitor. Anything the agent added that your spec didn't ask for gets reviewed or reverted.
This is a sweep task — tedious by hand, fast for an agent. Verify by ear: trigger each interaction in the headset and confirm the sound comes from the right place. Then replace placeholders with real sounds yourself; sound choice is taste, and taste isn't delegated.
The agent is guessing at ergonomics from transforms — a decent first pass, not a verdict. Check its three most confident findings in the headset and note where it was right and where a number on paper missed the felt reality.
- Haptics fire on grab and release, in the headset, on both controllers.
- The blind audio test works: eyes closed, you can point at every sound source.
- You walked every Blueprint change the agent made, node by node, and can explain each one.
stat unitin the headset still shows you inside your Week 10 frame budget.- AI log entry written: the spec, the diff, what you kept and what you reverted.
5:15 · Crit / share Headset rotation
Headsets on, rotation around the room: everyone grabs everyone else's object and listens to everyone else's space, thirty seconds each. One observation per piece: the moment presence held, or the moment it broke. Bring the design implication from your State of the Art reading — we'll sort them into "settled" and "contested" on the board.
Homework — due before Week 12
| Task | Deliverable |
|---|---|
| Finish Project 3 for crit: build runs on target hardware, interactions polished with this week's techniques. | Installed, launchable build + playtest notes from at least two classmates, per the project brief. |
| Draft your final project pitch — you present it next week, right after Project 3 crit. | Written + visual pitch: one page and 3–5 images/boards. Say whether it's headset, wall, or both. |
| Bring your AI development log up to date through today's spec-driven session. | AILOG.md current in the repo, spec and diff included. |
Resources
- IEEE VR 2025 conference awards — the best-paper slate; pick one for crit.
- CHI 2025 — spatial interaction — the second reading option.
- UE 5.8 release notes — the MetaHuman Collections section, before you populate a crowd.
- Meta Quest developer center — the interaction and comfort design guidelines are the industry baseline.
- Epic Developer Community — Learning — VR and audio guided courses.