Creator: Elisabeth de Kleer
Project: Communities
Reading through your blog posts the last couple weeks, I realized that many of you are working with teams, so I sent some emails and spent some time reaching out to friends who might come on board to write a couple short scripts for me and in general, help me with programming in Unity. I am independent to a fault, but like everyone, I have natural strengths and weaknesses. One thing I've been learning recently is that working in a well-balanced team means everybody wins AND the project gets delivered on time.
Over the last month, I spent a lot of time with my 3D scanner. This week, I got more acquainted with my Gear360 camera. I filmed a lecture, some promotional material for my friend's start up, and some footage of a prison reentry program that involves Dungeons & Dragons (the subject of a documentary I've been working on for the last year). I am becoming known as the girl with the 360 camera. It's a good way to get invited to things. :wink:
Here's a shot of the D&D group showing off their miniature figurines.
Next week, I need to:
-Work with someone to make sure my VR/360 integrations are compelling enough for the demo (or find a workaround).
-Decide which of the many communities spaces I've filmed to feature in my proposal.
Project: Communities
Reading through your blog posts the last couple weeks, I realized that many of you are working with teams, so I sent some emails and spent some time reaching out to friends who might come on board to write a couple short scripts for me and in general, help me with programming in Unity. I am independent to a fault, but like everyone, I have natural strengths and weaknesses. One thing I've been learning recently is that working in a well-balanced team means everybody wins AND the project gets delivered on time.
Over the last month, I spent a lot of time with my 3D scanner. This week, I got more acquainted with my Gear360 camera. I filmed a lecture, some promotional material for my friend's start up, and some footage of a prison reentry program that involves Dungeons & Dragons (the subject of a documentary I've been working on for the last year). I am becoming known as the girl with the 360 camera. It's a good way to get invited to things. :wink:
Here's a shot of the D&D group showing off their miniature figurines.
Next week, I need to:
-Work with someone to make sure my VR/360 integrations are compelling enough for the demo (or find a workaround).
-Decide which of the many communities spaces I've filmed to feature in my proposal.
Week 7: AthenaeumVR
After a hiatus last week (coming back from out of office/vacation and getting back to real life subsumed us all), and so, the push began anew. First things first. Co-founder pushing through with our art gallery partner to move forward on our agreement for work, and on my end? Several prongs. First, looking for talent to help us with our endeavor. Thanks to Cecile Esenazi, connected to an artist encalve over in Bulgaria, so broaching first conversations to explain our concept and see if there is a potential fit for them to help us.
Secondly, starting to formally (really put ink to paper) sketch out what the interim app will look like. Spent a fair amount of time going through personal and public photos of the gallery and conceptualizing a best fit for where a user will start in the VR experience. Admittedly, I have a vision of seeing the experience being based out of their classic courtyard in the antique wing. But with the new facility being constructed starting next year, its crucial that we also offer this as a design choice (for a starting point).
n t
he an
itu
Thinking a bit (on a tangent admittedly) about how well we could tweak our experience to AR as well, but at this juncture, erring on the side of conservatism and attempted perfection. As the saying goes 'you can do many things, half heartedly, or do 1-2 things, perfectly'. I believe we are all on the side of getting our VR experience wired and working on both Gear, Rift and Vive, and then looking at what the next steps hold.
Expanding creative conceptualization to more 'esoteric' concerns such as, should we offer different 'light' settings for a user? For example, does he/she want to tour the works/gallery in dawn light, twilight, night or full daylight? how much overhead/work is that (or is it just equivalent to a 'skinning' process?)
Is it just easier to create one settting and bake? (My desire runs towards the former rather than the latter).
Also thinking about motion through the experience.
Having spent a fair amount of 'research' time at the NY Met this summer, keenly aware of the coupling in motion to experience, but given the constraints in VR.... trying to best level how we will leverage this in our own.
Accessing portals is the easy part, but once within... steady motion as we learned bootcamp weekend probably first order solution, but wondering if for Rift, we can actually explore some 'minimal' motion... (exploring)
Continuing to explore the artists that are now doing more interesting pieces online and gallery side in VR only.
And also continuing to do Unity tutorials/education.
This week will be a bit throttled back due to a journey down to San Diego, but there will be some education along the way. We are going to take the 360 camera with us, and experiment, experiment EXPERIMENT. Looking forward to having a ton of footage to import into Unity next Sunday 😉 and mess with.....
After a hiatus last week (coming back from out of office/vacation and getting back to real life subsumed us all), and so, the push began anew. First things first. Co-founder pushing through with our art gallery partner to move forward on our agreement for work, and on my end? Several prongs. First, looking for talent to help us with our endeavor. Thanks to Cecile Esenazi, connected to an artist encalve over in Bulgaria, so broaching first conversations to explain our concept and see if there is a potential fit for them to help us.
Secondly, starting to formally (really put ink to paper) sketch out what the interim app will look like. Spent a fair amount of time going through personal and public photos of the gallery and conceptualizing a best fit for where a user will start in the VR experience. Admittedly, I have a vision of seeing the experience being based out of their classic courtyard in the antique wing. But with the new facility being constructed starting next year, its crucial that we also offer this as a design choice (for a starting point).
n the anituThinking a bit (on a tangent admittedly) about how well we could tweak our experience to AR as well, but at this juncture, erring on the side of conservatism and attempted perfection. As the saying goes 'you can do many things, half heartedly, or do 1-2 things, perfectly'. I believe we are all on the side of getting our VR experience wired and working on both Gear, Rift and Vive, and then looking at what the next steps hold.
Expanding creative conceptualization to more 'esoteric' concerns such as, should we offer different 'light' settings for a user? For example, does he/she want to tour the works/gallery in dawn light, twilight, night or full daylight? how much overhead/work is that (or is it just equivalent to a 'skinning' process?)
Is it just easier to create one settting and bake? (My desire runs towards the former rather than the latter).
Also thinking about motion through the experience.
Having spent a fair amount of 'research' time at the NY Met this summer, keenly aware of the coupling in motion to experience, but given the constraints in VR.... trying to best level how we will leverage this in our own.
Accessing portals is the easy part, but once within... steady motion as we learned bootcamp weekend probably first order solution, but wondering if for Rift, we can actually explore some 'minimal' motion... (exploring)
Continuing to explore the artists that are now doing more interesting pieces online and gallery side in VR only.
And also continuing to do Unity tutorials/education.
This week will be a bit throttled back due to a journey down to San Diego, but there will be some education along the way. We are going to take the 360 camera with us, and experiment, experiment EXPERIMENT. Looking forward to having a ton of footage to import into Unity next Sunday 😉 and mess with.....
Lantern Models
Put together a model of a lantern this weekend, and also got the Unity project building to the Gear VR. Celebrating this minor success!
It's a completely different feeling viewing this inside of the headset!
I had to tackle a lot of 3D processes, such as how to make a skybox, model, and texture. The lanterns, and eventually the level itself, are being created in Blender. I'm amazed at the in-VR-art that others are creating, it really adds that hand-crafted feel! My quest to try out Quill on the Oculus begins!
Lighting the lanterns has also been a bit challenging, especially when it comes down to the minute changes in each setting. Preliminary lights on the lantern had me put 5 spotlights on each one to light every side (including the inside).
Progress has been made! My goal for this demo is to build out a prototype of the first chapter, and have lots of great interactions with the boat and lanterns for the player to act out! Getting the blocky outline of the starting area gave me a better idea of how large of a space the boat is going to move through.
Given the speed of the boat (it's going to move very, very slowly), it'll be a couple minutes of gameplay.
Andrew
Updates from past week:
1. After receiving feedback from the Oculus team, I decided to whittle down my app structure and content format even further. Rather than trying to capture the complexity of a complete cycle of abuse in each experience, I want to focus each on a specific abusive behavior. Rather than a menu where portraits of storytellers are portals to an experience, I will create a simple menu with objects representing a behavior. The menu will have a label with the name of the behavior, as well as a short text description of the behavior. There will still be 5 experiences, with the following subject matter: Triangulation, Gaslighting, Minimizing, Stonewalling and Hoovering.
To start, each experience will contain a single sketch, with some elements potentially animated. The sketch will be accompanied by audio/dialogue that describes a specific scenario relating to the abusive behavior. In the future, I may continue to add additional scenarios from stories and memories contributed by other people.
2. I started work on the first experience, a representation of Triangulation. Triangulation is defined by Melanie Tonia Evans as "one individual attacking, discrediting (smearing) or/ and abusing another person with the use of third-party people or institutions." I created a short script, with helpful feedback from fellow launch-padder, Jesmin. She suggested including pauses between dialogue to allow for maximum impact. The resulting script is below:
3. I spent a day working in Tilt Brush to create the scene for the Triangulation experience. I still don't have my laptop back from Razer support and it has been the cause of much delay. I am so thankful that Jesmin and her collaborator helped me with their equipment and space to work for the weekend! I would have been much further behind without them. I am hoping the laptop finally comes back by the end of this week, though I can't be sure.
4. I hope to have the first sketch loaded onto a GearVR device later tonight so that I can do demos at the Tilt Brush event tomorrow night. Currently, I am running into some issues with Tilt Brush toolkit scripts not working on one of my backup computers. I am going to try loading the scene in an older version of Unity to see if that helps. Below is the sketch loaded in Unity, without the correct shaders applied. The scene is of two women sitting at a table in the kitchen of an apartment.
In the next week I plan to put together the app menu scene and use proxy models to trigger the loading of a scene. If there is time, I would also like to get the rough audio recorded and loaded into the scene. I will continue reaching out to find contributors to submit their stories for additional experiences. Jesmin may help with some of the Tilt Brush sketches and is attending the event at Google with me tomorrow to get feedback.
1. After receiving feedback from the Oculus team, I decided to whittle down my app structure and content format even further. Rather than trying to capture the complexity of a complete cycle of abuse in each experience, I want to focus each on a specific abusive behavior. Rather than a menu where portraits of storytellers are portals to an experience, I will create a simple menu with objects representing a behavior. The menu will have a label with the name of the behavior, as well as a short text description of the behavior. There will still be 5 experiences, with the following subject matter: Triangulation, Gaslighting, Minimizing, Stonewalling and Hoovering.
To start, each experience will contain a single sketch, with some elements potentially animated. The sketch will be accompanied by audio/dialogue that describes a specific scenario relating to the abusive behavior. In the future, I may continue to add additional scenarios from stories and memories contributed by other people.
2. I started work on the first experience, a representation of Triangulation. Triangulation is defined by Melanie Tonia Evans as "one individual attacking, discrediting (smearing) or/ and abusing another person with the use of third-party people or institutions." I created a short script, with helpful feedback from fellow launch-padder, Jesmin. She suggested including pauses between dialogue to allow for maximum impact. The resulting script is below:
You: “What do you want to do for dinner later?”
Them: “Hmm. Maybe that Thai place down the street?”
You: “Oh yeah, let’s do that.”
Them: silent, 5 seconds.
Them: “My friend offered to watch my dog for me.”
You: “Oh, that’s nice! When?”
Them: “Next weekend.” Silent 3 seconds. “It would have been nice if my own girlfriend offered...”
You: “My apartment doesn’t allow dogs... otherwise I would have.”
Them: silent 3 seconds, “They wouldn’t even know, she’s so quiet.”
You: “I could get evicted if someone saw and reported it.”
Them: “You know what, forget about it...”
3. I spent a day working in Tilt Brush to create the scene for the Triangulation experience. I still don't have my laptop back from Razer support and it has been the cause of much delay. I am so thankful that Jesmin and her collaborator helped me with their equipment and space to work for the weekend! I would have been much further behind without them. I am hoping the laptop finally comes back by the end of this week, though I can't be sure.
4. I hope to have the first sketch loaded onto a GearVR device later tonight so that I can do demos at the Tilt Brush event tomorrow night. Currently, I am running into some issues with Tilt Brush toolkit scripts not working on one of my backup computers. I am going to try loading the scene in an older version of Unity to see if that helps. Below is the sketch loaded in Unity, without the correct shaders applied. The scene is of two women sitting at a table in the kitchen of an apartment.
In the next week I plan to put together the app menu scene and use proxy models to trigger the loading of a scene. If there is time, I would also like to get the rough audio recorded and loaded into the scene. I will continue reaching out to find contributors to submit their stories for additional experiences. Jesmin may help with some of the Tilt Brush sketches and is attending the event at Google with me tomorrow to get feedback.