culinary-vr
2017 · Team of 3 (2 programmers, 1 designer) · In collaboration with the Diploma in Culinary & Catering Management
A VR training simulator that lets culinary students rehearse their table-setting practical exam in room-scale VR. The layout, cutlery placement, and grading criteria came directly from the diploma’s assessment rubric, so practice in-headset maps one-to-one onto the real test. Built in Unity for the HTC Vive using Unity’s VR Toolkit, with models authored in Autodesk Maya.
The simulator runs in two modes: a guided mode that shows ghosted placement outlines on the table and walks the student through the correct sequence, and a test mode that removes the guides and scores the finished setting.
Role and responsibilities
One of two programmers. My contributions:
- Object pooling and breaking — glassware and crockery shatter on impact and are recycled through a pool rather than instantiated per drop, keeping frame times stable
- Placement accuracy and scoring — measuring each placed item’s position and orientation against the rubric’s tolerances and grading the completed setting
- Game system — the Test / Guided mode split and the flow between them
- Object spawning and snap positions — spawn logic and the snap targets items settle into when placed correctly
Learning outcomes
- Room-scale VR development on the HTC Vive — controller interaction, grabbing, and physical object handling
- Why frame-time stability matters more in VR than raw throughput — dropped frames cause discomfort, which is what drove the pooling work
- Encoding an external rubric as machine-checkable tolerances, and picking thresholds forgiving enough to be usable but strict enough to be meaningful
- Working directly with a non-technical client department to validate realism
Build
Business School Culinary VR.exe — standalone Windows build. Requires an HTC Vive with SteamVR.
Media
| File | Description |
|---|---|
misc/Business Culinary VR.mp4 |
Gameplay walkthrough |
misc/Business VR Poster.png |
Project poster — premise and tech stack |
misc/culinary gameplay screenshot.PNG |
In-headset view showing ghosted placement guides and the serving tray |
misc/Culinary 01.png – misc/Culinary 03.png |
Additional screenshots |
misc/Culinary VR.pptx |
Project presentation deck |
misc/Reference Images/ |
Photographs of the real restaurant setting used as modelling reference |