Equine VR

This was the main job I did over the summer of 2022, working at the University developing a VR project.

The aim of this project was to produce a prototype AI horse that could respond to 3 parameters in a realistic manner. These were:

• Focus - Where you are looking and how hard you are looking at it
• Ask - How much energy you are bringing into yourself
• Neutral - How you are behaving around the horse

These might not be the best definitions, but the more important component is how the horse should respond to these parameters

Focus should control where the horse goes towards, with ask managing how fast the horse goes. Neutral manages the horse’s behaviour.

There were a variety of tasks that the player would be expected to undergo with the horse, modelled after realworld examples that I had the privilege of doing myself.

As the only developer on this, I aimed to make an AI that would be a general model of a horse’s behaviour rather than making a separate AI for each task, as this would have been more scalable for additional tasks.

This is a prototype project that is supposed to be a proof of concept, so the range of animations and assets was quite limited. However, I think I accomplished a good starting point for the next developer to work on it.