I never knew creating video games could be so easy. Unity takes the coding right out of the game design process and I am very grateful for that. It was a little difficult getting used to the interface, but once you’ve got the basics down, designing is a breeze. How the program works is very close to Halo forge, for those of you who have played that game. Its simple drag and place design makes it easy for anyone to create a walkthrough experience in a 3d world.

What did confuse me however, are all the options in the menus and the properties of each object. It will take a little bit more time for me to learn what each of those means and how to best configure the prefabs for each scene. One problem that I ran into was object collision within my scene. The player was constantly walking through objects instead of stopping where they were supposed to.

I also really want to learn how to animate characters. The scene looks very lonely without any sort of npc’s to fill it and my town looks more like a ghost town than anything. I am very curious on how to import objects that are not from the asset store as well. I really wish that I could import some of the architectural models that I made in rhinoceros3D. Also, I am unsure of how to use the other websites that provide prefabs.

I was able to find the virtual reality support option and try the scene in my oculus DK2. I found that what really works for VR is a dramatic shift in scale. Big things have a larger presence on the viewer and utilizes the entire field of view of the headset by forcing the viewer to look up instead of straight ahead all the time. However, some things do need to remain at the correct scale to give the viewer a sense of immersion because you want them to feel as if they can reach out and touch the object and that it would be very similar to real life.

Overall, I really enjoyed working with unity and see a lot of potential when combined with VR. I was very nervous about doing my senior thesis on VR when I did not know how to use the software, but now I am feeling a lot more confident! I feel as if I made the right decision because working with VR is a great skill to have for the future and I can see it getting very big in architecture.

P.S. for those of you who have seen Attack on Titan, there is a…colossal easteregg in there for you!