For my independent learning experience, I learned how to use Rogo Digital's Lipsync, an external plugin for Unity (like Playmaker). This plugin allows you to sync an audio file with facial animations, allowing your characters to come to life with dialogue. The plugin has some issues and a bit of a learning curve, but it is very powerful and has excellent developer support. Lipsync works by mapping "phonemes," or specific sounds, to different facial movements. Sometimes, different sounds are produced by making the same mouth shape (i.e., M, B, and P...
360 Video Project Proposal
by Joshua Daghir
- November 21
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360 Video Project Group: Oliva Arty, Josh Daghir, Sarah Knickerbocker, Samantha Koenig Our group would like to film part of a live show on CitrusTV for our 360 video project. We believe that 360 video would be an appropriate way to capture this environment. Specifically, we think that showing on-set anchors, camera-people filming, and other production people working behind the scenes would create a compelling experience that encourages the viewer to look around. My roommate is a producer for a sports show on CitrusTV, and has given our group permission...
Assignment 6 – Josh Daghir
- November 19
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In the complexities of crafting a visually compelling virtual world, it is easy to forget the importance of sound in creating a fully immersive experience. If virtual reality is meant to transport the user to a new world, then the more senses involved, the more complete the experience feels. Much like video, capturing sound for VR purposes is extremely different from traditional audio recording. How sound is captured in 3D space greatly impacts the polish of the final product. There are many tools to capture 3D sound. I find binaural...
Assignment 5 – Josh Daghir
- November 11
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Link to my scene in WebGL Capturing 3D objects in reality and translating them into virtual reality has been the most difficult assignment of this class yet. A combination of factors on both the user end and the software end make 3D capture hard to execute. My trouble first started with 123D Catch. The idea of being able to capture 3D models straight from your phone is compelling, but the software is simply not strong enough to create good models. I tried capturing objects in bright, even lighting, and usually...
Assignment 4 made me realize that animation is crucial for an experience to feel immersive. Animations make characters feel real. Despite their importance, applying animations is the trickiest Unity process that I have encountered so far. One of the reasons why adding animation is so complicated is because there are so many external programs involved. Mixamo and Fuse are incredible resources, and I cannot believe that they are currently free. The Mixamo library of animations is massive, and they work with all humanoid characters. I also created my own character...
Learning how to create interactive scenes is a huge step toward making more immersive experiences. In "real" reality, all actions have a reaction. Allowing a user's actions to have impact in the virtual world helps to make the user feel like he or she is really there. My interactive scene features two main interactive elements. The player starts off in dark tunnel, but as he or she walks forward, lights overhead turn on. As the player moves away from a light, it remains on, but dims to a less powerful level. The light...
Assignment 2 – Josh Daghir
- September 25
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Josh Daghir I expected using Unity to be extremely difficult for me, but after creating my first scene, I realized that I have done things like this before. When Prof. Pacheco was mentioning the student who brought his origami to class, I thought, “I must not be a 3-D thinker, I’ve always been terrible with origami and sculpture and any other 3-D project that students do in a high school art class.” But after working with the software, I realized that this type of work is what I loved to...
Assignment 1 – Josh Daghir
- September 10
- in
Before the class in the innovation lab, I had tried the Oculus Rift on two separate occasions, and Google Cardboard once. Large amounts of time passed between these experiences, so being able to try one VR device after the other allowed me to start to more fully understand the differences between them. I used the GearVR first, followed by Google Cardboard. One thing I noticed about the VR experiences that I tried was that they did not need a narrative to tell a story. Simply being in the space simulator...