Assignment five was a mixture of hope, frustration and ultimately disappointment. I was very excited to create a scene in which I could 3-D scan real-life objects into it, because there is a fascination associated with seeing real-life things in a virtual setting. It’s almost like it shouldn’t be there, and when it is you get this giddy sensation and think “Hey! I know what that is! I see that all the time!” Unfortunately, though, the technology just isn’t quite there yet to elicit such a response.

At first I tried recreating the innovation lab with this idea that I would put it in an abandoned building in the middle of the woods. It would be like you would stumble upon this shack, and then once you go in you see all this high tech gear. That didn’t quite work out, thanks to the 123D Catch app. While the premise of the application is pretty cool, and I think in time it will become a major staple of the VR industry, right now there are way to many flaws with it. It’s extremely slow, is unreliable on whether or not it will finish a scan and the images look pretty bad, especially when placed in virtual reality. Part of the problem is that it captures everything around the desired object, too, so instead of just copying a drone, parts of the table it’s sitting on is copied too.

I took probably 7 or 8 captures and only 3 of them ever finished processing. I had a second idea of copying all the statues around SU and placing them in my forest scene, but it took almost a full day for just one of them to finish downloading. When it finally downloaded, it didn’t even look like the statue. I don’t know if this was an error on my part or on the apps part, probably a combination of both, but that’s why this assignment was so frustrating.

I would have loved to have walked through my scene looking for statues or hoping to find my high tech shack, but I just wasn't able to make that happen.