Star-Bot

After our successful Mechatron VR outing at the 2017 Rio Tinto Innovation Festival at Scitech, we were invited to return in 2018.

Although the Mechatron was well-received in 2017, we did run into the issue that we could only put up to 6 kids on per ride, meaning a lot of people missed out. So for the 2018 festival, I decided to develop a fun, little networked, mobile VR game called Star-Bot.

In mid 2018, Frame Labs was approached to create and run a VR experience for the week-long Rio Tinto Innovation Festival at Scitech. The brief was intentionally open-ended. As long as it engaged a full group of 18 high school students and demonstrated technological innovation, the format was flexible. The challenge was the small budget and tight timeline, with roughly two months to design, build, and deliver the project.

I developed the experience solo, then hired and managed two recent interns to help deliver and operate the installation on-site. The result was a lightweight multiplayer VR game called Star-Bot, built specifically for a fleet of 18 Pico G1 3DoF headsets.

In Star-Bot, each player becomes a science cadet remotely teleoperating a probe droid on a distant alien planet. The objective is simple and competitive. Players explore, locate hidden crystal samples, and collect as many as possible within a 15-minute session. The movement system was designed around the limitations of 3DoF headsets, so players navigated by looking in a direction and pressing a button on the headset for comfortable, straightforward locomotion.

Sessions began on a spaceship in orbit, where players moved down to teleporters and selected from nine different worlds to explore. Once planetside, the crystal hunt began.

Because the Pico G1 is a relatively modest Android headset and the schedule was short, I leaned into a low-poly, faceted art style and used a mix of off-the-shelf Asset Store content to keep production efficient. Most of my time went into the multiplayer and synchronisation layer, so the experience felt truly shared. Players could see each other’s probe droids moving around in real time, and collectibles behaved consistently across all devices. When one player collected a crystal, it disappeared for everyone else, so that it could not be collected twice.

Even with simple mechanics, the experience worked surprisingly well in the festival environment. It was stable, scaled to the full 18-player setup, and ran smoothly throughout the week. Scitech were happy with the result, and it delivered exactly what the festival needed.