The Work

The Project

Over the summer of 2020, I directed the next phase of Chatroulette’s evolution, a VR app for SteamVR and Oculus Quest called Chatroulette Next.

The Brief

Andrey Ternovskiy, the founder of Chatroulette had put word out through the VR community that he was looking to build a VR product. After some initial discussions, it was revealed that he saw the future of Chatroulette being a VR product that can connect people, in a moderated and clean experience that could erase the troubled reputation of the company and connect its 3 million monthly users in a more meaningful way.

The Results

My team was successful in creating a multi-user MVP in VR that could pair two random users together to explore a series of environments with each other.

Before writing a single line of production code, I engaged Coal Car Studio (A Unity shop) to do some prototyping sprints to get our bearings and chart a course for our networking infrastructure. We took our learnings from those sprints into the production phase and had Coal Car take lead on art sourcing for the character/avatar system.

We could generate avatars using AvatarSDK, and users could communicate via voice chat and physical gestures in VR. Preliminary discussions with Oculus were favourable as they had expressed interest in having the app on the Quest platform.

Credits

CLIENT: CHATROULETTE

DIRECTOR: ANDRE ELIJAH

DEVELOPMENT: SCOTT MICHAUD + NOAH RAYBURN

PROTOTYPE DEVELOPMENT: SHANE NILSSON + ABEL WALLER