— PROJECT NAME

CIOFS

— DEVELOPED AT

Poplab s.r.l.

— ROLE

Lead Programmer

— DATE

March 2024 – May 2025

— SOFTWARE USED

Unreal Engine 5, Visual Studio, C++, Blueprint

— PLATFORM

Meta Quest 3, Windows

CIOFS is a multi-user virtual warehouse simulator developed for CIOFS Don Bosco of Padua. CIOFS Don Bosco is a vocational higher education institution. One of the activities carried out is the training of employees and operators in warehouses, and one of the key aspects of the course is knowing how to move in a warehouse and being able to perform picking of the required items.

Due to the difficulty of having students exercise in a real warehouse, it was required to create a VR simulator of a warehouse with all the necessary elements to allow students to practice in the most complex aspects, such as moving between the lanes paying attention to the picking carts of the colleagues, picking up the orders requested according to a picking list, and taking them to the packaging area.

The experience consist of a student wearing the Meta Quest, who is the Warehouseman, and another student who assists through a PC connected to the visor. The couple of students Operator/Controller can communicate using both the integrated voice chat and the text chat. The teacher has access to each experience through a specific desktop version: this version can also be used to set all the parameters of the exercise (e.g: the size of the warehouse, the number of rows, what needs to be picked up…) and, at the end of the exercise, see the results of each student, assigning a grade to them.

As lead programmer in a development team of 2 developers, I was responsible of the following aspects:

- development of platform specific Player Controlled Pawns, which can teleport locally and use voice chat: one for the Operator student (VR), one for the Controller student (desktop) and one for the teacher (desktop)

• - development of a networked system which allows the teacher to define the settings for the exercise and load them in the local server created on each Meta Quest. After the server is loaded up, the Controller student's PC connectes to a specific pre-defined Quest in order to help the Operator student. The teacher can see a list of all active local servers and access them to spectated students. At the end of the exercise, results are sent back to the teacher's PC to be examined.
• - definition of platform specific interactions throughout the whole experience: VR interactions if the user experiences the simulation by Oculus Quest, MnK interactions if the user is playing with a computer;

- development of all multiplayer features in a dedicated server model;

- implementation of an interaction system that allows users to interact with specific elements and to perform actions (e.g: riding picking carts or picking items from boxes on shelves); the system was developed with expansion in mind, allowing our team to define new elements while the experience evolved through the client's requests;

- implementation of custom Niagara effects;

- development of many different custom Materials;