After working with my preferred medium (video), we've stepped into a world that is much more complicated and frustrating - building environments in Unity.

Having played video games since I was small, the concept of building a 3D world isn't entirely foreign to me. I've messed around with The Sims and Halo's Forge mode, however I would always get frustrated when things wouldn't work exactly as I wanted. My experience with Unity was no exception. Trying to figure out why my colliders wouldn't work gave me headaches. Finding the right asset package for the theme I wanted to have was also a pain. However, after a few hours and some creative adjusting, I managed to put together a cool space environment. I even included the asset that makes it so users can explore my world in the HTC Vive. I had space ships, a space base, and a big ol' space mountain off in the distance. Things were lookin' good.

However, despite following the directions perfectly, I could not get my world to "build" (meaning I couldn't get it to export). My theory is that in my attempt to make a cool environment for users to explore rather than just a basic world for academic credit, I made things a little to complicated, which in turn made the file too big to export. Oops. I have, however, uploaded a screen cap video of my environment as it currently is. Hopefully, with some help from Unity users more experienced than I, this world will be up and running in a real VR headset (which would be a huge victory in my journey towards becoming a VR master).

https://youtu.be/HoPz5L2xedQ

As an aside: I chose a space environment because I think it makes the concept of "educational VR" feel more real to someone who has not been exposed to the medium yet. Being able to take students to the rings of Saturn or on one of the Voyager satellites as they hurdle out into the emptiness of open space would be so cool. We can't get ourselves to these places yet, but we can craft environments that feel almost like the real thing. It goes back to the idea of the "empathy machine" and making virtual worlds that can make our real world a better place.