The Borculo Storm Project

The Borculo Storm Project aims to create a realistic VR experience of a storm disaster. The Storm hit the Netherlands in 1925. The project also aims to raise awareness of natural disasters and climate change. It is supposed to be an exhibit of a future weather museum. Previously, the project has been worked on by students during the Smart Solution Semester in the Saxion XR-Lab. During that phase, Unreal was used as a game engine and the students created a small scene in which a basic storm is simulated. The group now switched to Unity as it is more convenient to work with. The old project files consisted of a basic particle setup, which needed to be reworked. The particles appeared to be appropriately sized on-screen but in VR the scaling increased and created an unrealistic look and feel. To convey the situation more appropriately, mesh destruction was used during this project to simulate the storm effect on buildings. Also, a realistic sound environment was added and the overall light in the scene was adjusted to create an immersive experience. Next to the visual and acoustic aspects, hyper VR was integrated, which means, the storm is not only going to be experienced visually over the VR goggles, but also physically, by using hardware such as industrial fans that are going to react to the stages of the storm.