Juli Whetstone

This project was definitely a test of patience for me. It was very frustrating to use a brand new program because I didn’t feel like I had all the necessary knowledge after our class instruction. It took a lot of troubleshooting throughout the whole project to try to get things right. Overall, it took much longer than I anticipated to work all the bugs out with the time constraints of this project.

My scene takes place in outer space, with two space ships looking like they are about to collide over the viewer’s head. It took a lot of fiddling around to try to get each spaceship tilted and positioned the way I wanted to. I really liked the purple skybox that I found for my project. For my objects I downloaded two different stones and two different space ships. I applied a sand texture to the terrain but used more of a rocky texture to paint the mountains.

Part of my issues came with just navigating around my world. I knew in my head where I wanted to look at but it was a struggle to actually figure out how to get there in the easiest/fastest manner. This also related to trying to place objects and make sure they were actually where I wanted them to be. When trying to download objects, at first it was confusing to me which item was actually the object within the folder that would be added to the scene.

I liked that some of the objects I downloaded came with additional textures. My scene features two kinds of stones that I downloaded. Each stone came with additional textures to apply to the stones. I tried to use a texture from one stone and applied to the two different stones so they looked similar in color despite their size differences. This worked out well for me.  I struggled to add sound to my object. When I did figure it out, I couldn’t figure out how to loop the sound so it would play the entire time. Even though I did add sound to the clip, none of the audio was captured when I did the screen recording. In the future, I would like to learn more about animating objects and getting them to move through the scene. 

Thought exercise:

I think that it could be really powerful to tell historical events through Unity scenes, especially for educational purposes. Some kids don’t get a feeling of how historical narratives really happened just by reading about them in a textbook. It could be more meaningful for the students to experience them in a virtual reality way where they feel like they are experiencing the events. It would be really cool to interact with historical figures. One of the issues with this though would be trying to stay true to what actually happened and attempting to exactly recreate a scene from history.

Stories that tackle racism could also be done really well through Unity. One of the courses I am taking right now is Race, Philosophy, and Education. We talk a lot about white privilege and how some people may not see the racism that still exists in the world because they benefit from it themselves. By creating a story in Unity where someone experiences racism, it could create more of an empathetic response that could affect how those people act in real life. It is a way for people to almost literally walk in someone else’s shoes. It opens up a new perspective for people.

It’s important that as the user moves through the scene that they feel like they’re really there despite it not being a real video. There need to be sounds that help add to the effect of being in the scene. There also need to be visual clues that help the viewer navigate around. It can be overwhelming to take everything in so there need to be objects, people, or text that guide the experiencer throughout the story.