I am a strong believer in the potential for VR, and as a result, decided to experiment with building experiences in VR. After building in both Unity and Unreal, I decided to focus most of my programming effort in Unity because of it's superior collection of free-for-use 3D assets and the wider availability of plugins. I ended up abandoning my early VR projects because they were too ambitious (large, multi-block explorable cities) and instead decided to refine my skills on a smaller sandbox (pun intended).
I created a tropical island, surrounded by calm seas and beautiful skies. The ground is littered with high-poly rock scans and coconuts that the user can pick up and play with, as well as tropical foliage and palm trees that sway in the wind. As the user approaches the water, they hear gentle waves, and as they approach the center of the island, tropical birds chirping at each other.
I designed and tested the system on my personal HTC Vive, and it works on the Oculus Rift (with touch controllers) as well. Porting to Cardboard / GearVR / DayDream is proving trickier, especially as there will be necessary UX changes.