A last minute change of plans made me completely rethink my final project. Originally I had proposed to do my final project on architecture thesis, but after reviewing what I needed for thesis and what I needed for this class, I found that there was no storytelling aspect in what I was doing for thesis. I am still excited to say that I am writing my senior thesis on virtual reality, and I have already created demos in unity to show to my critics, but I decided to...

Working with sound was a very enjoyable experience for me. I created a scene and tried to use sound to tell the story. Working with the assets I had from the unity store, I was able to create a grungy sewer scene and a dungeon. The story starts with the character waking up inside the sewer having no recollection of how he get there. From there he goes on to find a fire and eventually a trap.   I had my friend voice act for me to guide the player...

Reality capture is such a cool concept—taking things from the real world and replicating it in virtual reality. It’s aspects like this that add to the immersion factor and blur the lines between virtual and reality. This concept reminded me a lot of the movie Inception. There was a line in there that read “Never recreate places from your memory…because building a dream from your memory is the easiest way to lose your grasp on what's real and what is a dream”. In the movie, losing your grasp on what’s...

  I love how this class finds work around for things. Last week we learned how to animate without coding and this week we learned how to make characters without 3D modeling. Mixamo is a program that lets the user create a character based on a set of options similar to the character creation system in videogames such as the sims and skyrim. Fuse lets you pick body parts, clothing, and even textures to create your ideal character. Once a character is created, it can be uploaded onto the mixamo...

Adding interactivity into a scene through playmaker is easier than I expected. The visual programing that playmaker provides converts lines of code into many options within unity engine. Clear flow charts represent how your animation moves. However, I found that this way of animating to be very limiting because you can only activate what animations are premade and tied to the models. I was frustrated that I could not easily move a character’s arm in a specific way. For example, in my scene there is a large zombie outside the...

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...

In class on Wednesday I had the pleasure of trying on some different virtual reality headsets. I tried Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear VR, and Oculus Rift DK2. These immersive headsets worked to create presence and use 360 degree video and head tracking to either tell stories or create an experience for the user.   The first one I got to try was the Treyvon Martin experience on the google cardboard. I thought the experience was okay, but the graphics definitely distracted me from the story. Using real audio from the...