Automation of the virtual jump simulator

This thesis presents an approach for integrating multi-sensory feedback with a computer graphics environment designed for use with Virtual Reality, namely the Virtual Jump Simulator, or Jumpcube for short. Since none of the existing solutions would meet our requirements, we decided to build an open, modular, and scalable platform for creating multi-sensory feedback devices to be used in Virtual Reality. To keep development costs and time low we used mainly off-the-shelf hardware components. For the same reason we also opted for a communication backbone based on Ethernet, modern Web technologies, namely JSON and the SocketIO protocol, and Python as the programming language for the logic running on the multi-sensory feedback devices. We demonstrated, that such a communication backbone is flexible and both easy to implement and to maintain. Further, we showed that the additional latency introduced by the use of high-level programming languages and non-real time capable communication is negligible in the scope of a computer graphics environment. To determine the impact the system has on the user we conducted both a quantitative and a qualitative experiment. Both showed that multi-sensory feedback in a Virtual Reality environment is noticed by the vast majority of the users and has a positive influence on the overall user experience, in particular on the degree of presence reached by the test subject.