Putting It All Together Final
THE HULL HOUSE EXPERIENCE
Hull House in 20th Century
What is The Hull House Experience?
The Hull House Experience is the ultimate museum, which will physically take the visitor back in time to encounter the monumental impact of the Hull House on the development of Chicago and its peoples. Using VR technology, the visitor will be able to explore the Hull House and learn its history from anywhere in the world. Not only will they be able to view the Hull House as it exists today similar to visiting the Hull House museum, they will also be able to visit parts of the house that no longer exist and see how it might have looked in its heyday.
Visitors will start with a 3D view of the outside of the Hull House constructed from actual photographs and choose from a menu of experiences. Visitors can choose to explore an ethnic evening in the dining room complete with time period accurate guests, music, and decor, an afternoon in the coffee house and theatre, explore the living space in the apartments, or check out a music lesson in the music school. As they explore, various informational pop-ups will guide the guest and give them engaging historical facts about the space.
To keep the guests engaged, there will be a point system for collecting hidden photos and exploring the experience to encourage children and curious adults to check out everything. They can get points for watching a play in the Theatre, watching a music lesson, or finding informational postcards hidden throughout the house.
Availability and marketing of the experience can be customised to fit UIC’s goals, but we recommend making this available within the Hull House Museum itself as well as an app available for purchase on a VR marketplace like Steam or the Oculus Quest Store, making the museum available to people across the world on one of the fastest growing markets in the world.
Best of all, the experience will be pleasant for the museum staff as well as a fully automated educational tool in the museum that requires next to no prior skill to operate and minimal upkeep. Once the experience is made and put on the market it will be a completely self-contained package, no further intervention will be required unless UIC desires it.
Mood Board
How It Works?
Unity and VRTK allow for us to program an avatar which tracks and replicates the users movements and reacts to their inputs. This also allows the user to both explore by physically walking or teleporting using buttons on a VR controller. These controllers come standard with VR headsets. Using the built in tracking functionality of VR headsets, the program will let the visitor explore the space and interact with objects as though they were truly there.
Development Timeline
Hardware and Software Requirements
The final product should be a virtual reality experience that can be tried both with our own VR headset downloading it from an online store like Steam or directly in the museum using a VR headset provided by it. Our idea is to provide to the museum manager a product that is ready to be installed on a virtual reality device and that can be uploaded on an online store in order to allow people to try this experience also from home, especially in this period of time.
To develop this product the idea is to use a well known graphic engine like Unity in order to have a product that is easily maintainable. Furthermore it also has different packages that support virtual reality like VRTK. It is a quite basic way to implement virtual reality, but it can be a good choice for our product because we do not need too many types of interactions with the environment and it is also free, so we can reduce the cost of the whole project.
Concerning the creation of the environment, our idea is to recreate the parts of the Hull house that still exist using a 3d scanning of the Hull House museum and then recreate some other parts of the Hull House from scratch. The final VR experience will allow us to see also the exterior of Hull House that will be built using the historical photos available. The various rooms were built like in the period in which Hull House was in operation. So we will require various assets like sounds, texture, models and animations that will be bought from external sources.
The final product is intended to run on Oculus Quest 2 since this device has different good features (like the absence of cables) that make it very versatile and easily usable also by non-professional people. It is also one of the most widespread VR headset and this lets us enlarge the number of possible interested customers. We will also need an Oculus Quest to test the product during the development.
Staffing Requirements
Most of the work can be done by the developers for the VR experience but there are certain aspects of the project that will be outsourced or we will be needing extra staff. Unique 3D models and audio would be outsourced and bought from third party sources. We would put the entire project together. Scanning the house would be done by us with rented equipment. A historian can be staffed as well to make sure the experience is as close to authentic as we can make it.
Cost
Development Cost:
The costs to develop this virtual reality experience is around 50,000$. The team will be composed of 4 developers that will develop the entire product, so the costs for the development team are around 36,000$ for 10 weeks of work. The hardware costs are due to the Oculus Quest 2 for testing that has a cost of 300$. The software costs are related to the purchase of the graphic engine, in this case we will use the professional version of Unity that will cost approximately 1,500$. Then we also need all the 3D and graphic assets that will have an approximate cost of 4,000$.
All these costs will be covered with an initial investment by the museum that also will pay to set up the VR experience in the museum. The setup costs in the museum will be around 600$ - 1000$, based on the number of VR headset it will buy and use in the museum.
There are not further costs because the product will be easily installed and does not need an expert to support the visitors when they try the VR experience.
User Pricing
The product will bring money from the purchases online and from the additional price to try the experience in the museum. The museum can also benefit from the increment of visitors.The costs for the visitors will be 8$ to try the experience in the museum. It will also be available online at a cost of 10$. The choice of this price is done to let more people try the experience also at home and the fame of the museum.
