Week 11: Oculus Launch Pad (Due September 3rd Midnight)

[Anonymous]

Please share your Week 11 update. Please note Ebony is out on vacation until September 5th. 

[AVCVgames]

Micah 
Week 11 | 8/27 - 9/2

Personal Observations/Progress

• This week I wanted to tackle the logo design, graphic design and promo art for my project. I knew this would take a while, as this is one of the most important parts of any app. I probably spent two days or more working on various logo and background combos until I finally had about 4 different variants that I liked. However, I couldn't decide which direction I wanted to pursue, so similar to what I've done in the past, I posted my two favorite promos on my facebook wall and asked my friends to vote! This was really helpful and I was actually very surprised with how "one-sided" the response was. In fact, I was leaning in the opposite direction! The two promo variants were logo on a sunset background and logo on a tree lined background -- sunset won by a landslide! (I'm still partial to the trees tho)
  
  
  

Production Progress

Task: Create Promo Artwork and Graphics

As I mentioned above, I spent a couple of days working on my promo artwork and logo. Overall, I'm satisfied with what I have, but will likely push it a bit further. I now realize that I need to create a hero image/character which is a little tricky at this stage. I don't want to reveal the angels initially but it would make sense to have some representation of them. For now, I'm good with what I have and will think about generating more promo artwork down the road.

Task: Integrate Entitlement Check

The most important thing I had left to do was integrate the required entitlement check into my project. This turned out to be trickier than I expected. In my initial review of the Oculus documentation, the integrate seemed to be straightforward. I assumed that I would simply create a script and add the entitlement initialization line with my app id, however upon a closer review, I realized that the Oculus documentation didn't actually tell you WHAT to do once the entitlement is called. In short, you need to figure out how to handle a legit request versus a bad/false request. Fortunately, I found a good thread on the Oculus developer boards which provided a script template that worked like a charm for me. I made two different builds (one with a bad appID and one with my actual appID) and tested the entitlement function. It worked and I was done!

Task: Upload First Build

After integrating the entitlement check and creating my promo artwork, I finally got around to uploading my first build to the Oculus developer dashboard. The publishing process was fairly straightforward and very similar to the Apple App Store submission process. (I'd guess there are some former Apple employees at Facebook/Oculus which would explain it 😉 I uploaded a build to the Alpha channel and will upload my final build to the BETA channel tonight. Depending on the final submission instructions for the OLP program, I should be done!

To all my fellow OLP'ers it's the home stretch! Keep pushin'

[madewithbacon]

Just got home from a week of shooting in Juneau. We were pretty much everywhere: mountaintops, beaches, rivers, glaciers, forests, cities, a homeless encampment and a police station. The footage and interviews we captured are nothing sort of incredible. Not sure if I'll make the OLP deadline because the editor I had lined up to help me is now drowning in bigger / higher profile and better paying jobs. Fingers crossed I can get *something* across the finish line; I have a script and plan plotted out for a simple, "easy" to execute proof of concept teaser. But if we don't make it, I'm still glad we went when we did to be there for not just one but *two* events that will be incredibly important and powerful elements of the story we're telling. 

[ndshort]

Neil D. Short
Project Title: Achilles Heel
Type: 360
Video Series
Genre:
Sci-Fi Sitcom

OLP17 - Blog 11 

This week was all about
postproduction. Our process started with reviewing the footage shot on our two
camera set rigs. The footage from our 7-camera GoPro rig was more difficult to stitch
and some errors are still there, but it was easier to key out the green screen
and the actor’s performances were better.  



We’ve decided to use the GoPro footage over the Gear 360 and own the hiccups by weaving them in as part of the story if we don’t have time to get a better stitch.
 (Image enlarged to show stitch problem, resolution is much better.)

 

After a lot of test renders and viewing the rough composite with our 2D background, we decided to shift gears and try a 3D model background instead. Our VFX compositors are working on that now while we build the Unity app. 


 
Now
that we have a rough cut of the series cut together, our composer is beginning
to work on the score.



My
original plan for the opening was to have several virtual screens with video
playing on them to coincide with voice over narration, but since we’re not
going to have time so we are going to use a series of still images
instead.
 

 
We will use the same
approach for a character that we weren’t able to shoot live. The mysterious
Dark Figure will be represented by still drawings for the demo.
 

 
Lots more work to do as we
race to the finish line.
It’s been a wild ride!

[sskolnik]

Shayna Skolnik, Week 11 Oculus Lanuch Pad

This week has mostly been panic mode as to why the container app is still not working. We have tried an outside plugin, I've read myriad posts and blog entries, and I'm just frustrated and nervous. To feel productive I also worked on a lot of the graphic assets (not required, but nice to work on).




I have another developer I could go to, but it seems  very late in the game. (Plus, he lives in Houston and has no running water or Wi-Fi. I realize my problems pale in comparison to those in Houston!)

So basically all interaction and stretch goals have been scrapped as we just focus on basic functionality and getting a 360 video player that doesn't crash upon launching the app. Sigh! (Can you tell I'm frustrated and nervous?)

We are coming down to the wire, and I'm still optimistic. Also the events in Texas this week couldn't be more timely for my climate change content which gives me renewed determination to see this project launched and making an impact.

Good luck to all of us who have made it to this point of the OLP journey! I can't wait to celebrate with everyone when our functioning apps are submitted!

[Anonymous]

OLP2017 - Week 11

I'm still struggling with getting the video effects that I want to use to perform well on the gear. I will be re-rendering some of the video pieces and re-compositing and hopefully I will arrive at an even better visual solution. The mother of necessity is indeed invention. I really, really, want to push something to alpha by mid-week! In spite of the tech learning curve, I am still having a blast with all of this and have enjoyed and been inspired by the OLP community so much. I am determined! Back to the drawing board...

[doubleeye]

Double Eye Blog - Week 11 - THE FILM & THE SOUND

Writing and Recording

I’ve never considered myself a writer but I am proud that I’ve written this script --  from these tiny films within the game to the overall UX. It’s new territory for me and I’m stretching a new creative muscle.  My incredible collaborator Alyssa Landry is a writer I admire and she’s been so positive about my writing. She has been amazing to rewrite, add, invent and make everything I have written better. For the first time I feel a little like a writer.

We recorded with talent in a proper recording studio (so fancy) and it’s thrilling to hear this dialogue spoken out loud. The voices in my dreams are coming alive! Each performer brought such nuance. I pulled them all in different directions. None of them have done VR so it will be thrilling to bring them back to see (and hear) what they have been a part of.

(Pictured with actor Maria Soccor playing Anita Montez. Shout out to Gigantic Post for donating hours in this very fancy Manhattan sound recording booth)

After the recording session I spent a lot of time in the editing room, re-syncing all of the video that we had already edited which had the corrupted digital glitch. It’s very strange that the Action Director software added this glitch and I’ll have to delve further to see what happened, after we deliver. I also pulled in the new imagery that we restitched manually.

Then I worked with one of my favorite editors Olga Lvoff who wants to learn editing for VR and 360 video. We took all of the voices from the recording session and cut them creatively.  The 360 videos still need VFX, fine stitching and color correction (which need a budget) but for a rough cut it’s a good start.

New Skill acquired this week: A friend over at East Coast Digital taught me how to mask out a monopod. It’s a decent 20 step process and I’ve managed to do about 4 clips. The most challenging was masking the umbrella out of the sky from the rainy production day. Lots more to go but these finer details may go unnoticed and may need to wait until after our submission.

Sound design is critical for VR. Sometimes when I begin to concentrate on the sound of the story in VR, it almost feels more important than what I am seeing in front of me.  The role of sound design in a VR experience feels very special and unique. We want to spatialize the sound so we are planning to work with the Two Big Ears / Facebook Spatial Workstation. A fantastic designer (Diego Jiminez) who has worked on some of my VR projects (Boxed Out, Cardboard City) has volunteered some of his time to design this thoughtfully in a way that supports the story.

Mechanics, models, layout coming together. This final week we will merge everything!

[valerieechevest]

Week 11

I can’t believe this week is the last stretch! As my blog posts have suggested, my concept has changed and grown over the Launchpad experience. My goal has always been to explore how 360 film could be used for public health. During my experience as a public health professional and a graduate student in health communication at GW, 360 film is the most powerful resource I’ve ever seen for increasing awareness and raising intention to act to support a public health cause. My idea was to create a 360 film that tackles the issue of food access injustice in Washington, DC. For the Ward 7 & 8 areas of DC there are only 3 grocery stores for 150,000 people. I started the summer by learning about the issue from policy papers and reports. Then, I dived deep into the issue by meeting with local organizations that run programs that actually improve the situation.

Organizations I met with:

DC Urban Greens- Run two urban gardens in Ward’s 7 & 8, weekly farmers markets and distribute free food bags in Ward 8.

Green Scheme- Develops and manages 15 community gardens in elementary schools, high schools, churches and housing centers in DC.

YMCA, DC- Runs affordable cooking classes for DC adults in Ward 8.

Ward 8 Farmers Market-  The 1st farmers market in Ward 8, originally established in 1996.

Arcadia Markets- Runs mobile farmers markets that set up weekly in areas in Ward 7 & 8.

Cultivate the City- Develop and manage urban gardens, host cooking classes, distribute CSA and teach people how to create and sell food products with garden produce they grow.

Ward 7 & 8 health council chairs- Chair health councils that impact the policy and program decisions in Ward 7 & 8, planning a food access march in October.

DC Greens- Provide policy analysis, advocacy and run programs to increase access to healthy foods by all residents in DC.

These conversations greatly impacted my thoughts on how to present the issue in a film. What originally started as a traditional 360 film that explained the bad situation, it was getting towards the dangerous line of ‘misery porn’ despite my best intentions. After the first few days of filming and after all the conversations I’d had with leaders from the organizations, I realized I had to rethink the entire film. This led me to my final concept of one short (45 sec) film where a community leader explains the situation then a series of short films (3-5 min) that show the work of the organizations that are solving the food access issue. This way, the issue can be shown in a positive light and the films can be for the community who is facing the problem, not just about them. I’m very excited for the concept I ended up with and look forward to completing my pitch proposal and film this week!

Best of luck to everyone!

[haskins]

Thoughts from week 11:

This weekend we made a lot of progress! Allison has fleshed out all of the scenes at this point, as well as designed a sweet 80's inspired logo for Danciverse! Rob has been working on a number of different audio tasks, from finalized tracks to coming up with last minute environmental sound effects. I’ve got a fine-tuned laser pointer / event system going I like that works on the store build, after writing and scrapping a couple approaches. Right now, as I write this, the project is re-importing assets for Android. We have a pretty nasty crash… just about every UnityEngine.UI class started throwing red errors in the console. I think this was due to a failed import / something weird with Unity Collaborate. (Good thing I keep backups!) Either way, I’ve managed to recover the project by getting rid of the Library directory, and reimporting everything. Now I’m at the point where I’m sending a build to the phone, and it’s reevaluating all the assets again. It’s been going for about an hour.. It has several gigs to process so I imagine this is going to take a while. While it definitely sucks to have to deal with these kind of setbacks late into the project, to be honest, I expect them at this point. Not that I’m pessimistic, I consider myself more of a realist. This technology, game engines and virtual reality, is bleeding edge stuff that’s complicated and complex.. It’s not for the feignt of heart. That reminds me, a good chunk of my Unity Timeline stuff I planned on using from Unity 5.6 no longer works due to API changes in 2017! So I decided to power level, and I was fortune to find the Unity Unite 2017 talks on the current version of Timeline, published a month ago. This was a very good find! I spent a few hours watching the talks.. And they were great talks with live demos! Now, I’m back up to speed with what I need to do working with the new system.







This final week coming up is about putting the pieces together. Allison and Rob have been working hard to produce art and sound, and I’m doing my best to add them into the game as fast as they are being produced. To be real, I’ve not left my apartment much in the last couple weeks, and I’ve grown a couple Linux-level beards. I’ve given it everything I’ve got to get this far with our VR project, and I’m about to put in another glorious week of work to bring the demo home!



At the end of the day, I feel my personal growth as a VR developer has been everything I could have hoped for. My Oculus publishing is 1000% better than when I began this journey. I feel good about being able to share some of that knowledge back to the OLP community with a couple tutorial videos on publishing. I’m getting good feedback, it’s my pleasure to create these resources, in a way I’m just paying it forward. Also, the understanding I have for mobile development has grown a lot as well.. Sitting in the room with the Unity experts at OLP with Chris teaching was a great kick in the ass for me, that I could step my game up even further (ex: how have I NOT been using the frame debugger?!). Since that time I’ve gone down the rabbit hole and learned so much about optimization that I’m sure it’s going to lead to gains in my Rift projects, as well as future Gear VR projects. We’re already coming up with Gear VR project ideas, some of which are ideas left on the cutting room floor from our work on the Danciverse demo.







Win or lose, OLP has been quite an experience and an honor. To go from messing around with the Oculus DK1 for kicks, to going all in on VR in ‘14, to getting invited to fly out to Oculus HQ at Facebook.. And to be given the gear and support to shine.. Well, I am very grateful for the opportunity, and as such I’ve given it literally everything I’ve got! Win or lose, this has been a great experience. I’m thankful for the opportunity, and I’m thankful for the wonderful people I’ve meet along the way. The end of OLP 2017 may be at hand, but my team and I, we’ve been here since the beginning, and we’re far from done creating VR content, no matter how things play out.



PS. This just in.. the crashed project has been recovered, the build finished after a couple hours, and now works in the headset! WE’RE BACK BABY!

[meredithwilson]

Dev Blog 11 - Cloudrise 

The end is near, very near. Ashley Godbold created some amazing UI for our habitation pod scene, it's truly awesome! I'll be very interested to hear feedback on this aspect of the game since the medium (or media in this case) through which you interact with NPC's is not a conventional text system.


Also the habitation pod has been spruced up with some free props from the asset store. 

I also tilted the whole tunnel track up a few degrees in the flight level because I've noticed that either neutral or downward head position hurts my neck after awhile when I'm wearing the GearVR. There have also been a few instances on twitter where other women who wear VR headsets frequently complaining of neck strain during games where the player is made to look downward for much of the gameplay. It might not weigh a ton in the grand scheme of things but even a few pounds can cause some nasty strain if your neck isn't that robust. So yeah, I tilted the whole track up. Playing now feels way better on my neck at least. 

I’m still plagued by jagged edges in the GearVR build but everything else is running great. Just as soon as that's fixed, along with a few random things, and we'll be ready to submit!

Good luck everyone!

[brianrusseldavi]

https://blog.paperchasegame.com/today-was-a-redletter-day-e2508ad93582