Colonoscopy simulator for semester project

For my semester project I need to make a simulator of a colonoscopy. It should work like a flight simulator where you steer a “snake” through a VR tunnelsystem. Everytime the tip of the snake touches the wall it would save this in a place that the player can’t see.
The problem is that I haven’t used Unreal Engine before or even made 3D/VR models/games.
Does anybody have an idea to how I could do this in the most painless way? Also I can’t see to find the setting to make a cylinder hollow so if somebody knows how to do that please help :slight_smile:
Love Christina

It’s going to be very difficult for you to be able to do a project without any experience in a single semester–getting a handle on 3D modeling is a challenge in itself much less trying to do a game as well.

I agree and am curious if you are in a class that is teaching these skills or if this is for a medical course or something. Otherwise, I don’t get how you’d be expected to learn this (without support from an instructor) simply by going on the forums and asking for advice. That seems like a terrible project assignment.

Hi @CKeller,

While I do agree with the other posters (this may be quite challenging to get done in 1 semester), I will try to give you a few more specific details:

For 3D modeling, download “Blender” - its free and can be used to create your 3D assets. You can easily create a cylinder as a primitive shape and go from there.

For Unreal, create an Actor Blueprint to represent the tool in the game. Create a collision volume where you want to detect collision within the cylinder. Use the OnHit event to detect a collision and “break the hit” from the event. The hit event will give you “Impact location” and other useful information you can save. So if you wanted to save where the tip hits you could use the Impact Location and save it in a Vector Array every time a hit is detected.

Hope this helps!

It’s ment to be for a medical study to see if using VR to perform colonoscopys (?) will minimize the amount of critical errors done in comparison to errors done on a regular table top monitor. But our professor has no VR experience either sooo we’re all a bit screwed xD

Thank you so much @CoquiGames <3

Another option would be to create the tunnel as a procedural mesh.
How is the character movement done? Swimming motions with the hand controllers?

<awkward anachronism>
back in my days, cameras for colonoscopies were hand-cranked…
</awkward anachronism>

@KVogler
The idea way that you would be able to make the character change direction with the arrow keys and then use the spacebar or somthing like that to move forward. For some reason the school has the Oculus but not the hand controllers xD

I do not like thinking about critical errors during colonoscopys.