Week 10:
I have been implementing music functionality. I want the worlds and game play to be generated by music files.
The following image demonstrates where I am with my work. These cannons fire based on notes, and then I "smash" them with the Oculus Go controller. Currently smashing Lovefool by the Cardigans 🙂
- Ciera
Oculus ID: Ciera_Jones
Instagram/Twitter/Facebook/Medium: @cieraej
Email: ciera.jones.cj@gmail.com
Website: cierajones.com
I have been implementing music functionality. I want the worlds and game play to be generated by music files.
The following image demonstrates where I am with my work. These cannons fire based on notes, and then I "smash" them with the Oculus Go controller. Currently smashing Lovefool by the Cardigans 🙂
- Ciera
Oculus ID: Ciera_Jones
Instagram/Twitter/Facebook/Medium: @cieraej
Email: ciera.jones.cj@gmail.com
Website: cierajones.com
Image: Some prototype 3D art created by our 3D modeller Virginia. These spirit animals play a crucial role in Nathaniel's story that we are telling in VR.
Introduction
This past two weeks have been an interesting sprint into getting some 3D content we can start to build interactions into into; while also better designing both the front and back-end. Also we have had many discussions, as team, about direction so that everyone on board with the (uncertain, as we are prototyping) way forward.
Past
We have a solid back-end and front-end with only a few more items to put in. We are also starting to to move away from our stand-in assets to create content that will part of the prototype and final product of the future.
Present
So we now are starting to get our 3D content in, which will really help us start bringing in the multi-user interactions we want to apply. For the prototype we are want to have two "sets" of environments - one describing a personal and spiritual journey of my new friend Nathaniel, and another describing the history of Canadian civil rights pioneer Viola Desmond. Ultimately we want to show how this platform can help tell known stories in a new powerful way (Viola's); alongside more personal and private stories that we can all relate to, and learn from.
Image: Some prototype 3D art created by our 3D modeller Virginia. Much of Nathaniel's story takes place in nature.
Additionally I have been concurrently modelling some rough mock-ups of the three environments that will define Viola Desmond's story (while Virginia works with Nathaniel on his); that I have been testing by placing on Sketchfab - such a great tool!
- Environment 1 - Salon Test: The start of Viola's story as a beautician and entrepreneur that wanted to help train other women how to style, as well as provide beauty products created specifically for black woman (something missing in Nova Scotia at the time).
- Environment 2 - Theatre Test: 1946, The Roseland theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia where she refused to move off a seat "reserved for white people". Not unlike Rosa Parks stand 9 years later where it was unplanned. Though there were no "Jim Crow" laws in Canada there was still a lot of subversive racism. Viola was charged for the tax evasion of (1 cent) by sitting in the front-row when she only had a ticket for the balcony.
- Environment 3 (to be shown soon) - Nova Scotia's "Province House" : 2010, where Viola was granted free pardon (meaning the province accepts full responsibility for the injustice) for the wrongful tax evasion conviction. Viola Desmond tragically died in New York 1965; so the success of her story is in very large part to her sister, Wanda Robson, that had fought hard for the province, and Canada, to hear and accept responsibility for her sister's story. Viola Desmond has been featured on a Canadian stamp, and will also now be the first woman (on her own, 2nd otherwise) to be featured on Canadian currency this year.
https://sketchfab.com/models/b3bf9ef4dd6346a0b28929d564166c06/
https://sketchfab.com/models/babf972ac6074bf2a11c11c95500aed7/
The Team
I also want to acknowledge the wonderful team that has been critical and getting us this far and in this speed. There have been some bumps as as we all get comfortable with uncertain nature of exploring the use of socialVR in storytelling and learning; but it certainly takes a village to raise this VR child! Beyond bringing in their more focused expertise to make the entire project better they have all shared many wonderful ideas that have helped shaped how this platform will ultimately work.
- Nathaniel, our storyteller that is sharing his own spiritual journey in addition to creating an archetype on how we can help others, in the future, tell their own in VR. He thoughts on how everything is interconnected are woven through all facets of this project.
- Virginia, our 3D modeller that is helping model the environments in Nathaniel's story and providing some great feedback, from a content creative perspective, on our own development processes.
- Grant Lucas, our back-end specialist that has been so helpful is setting up a system and processes that have made development much faster.
- Tetsuro Takara, our front-end developer and designer than has been helping the more traditional web sides look great; in addition to setting up a front-end development pipeline that makes development more efficient and beautiful.
- Anthony Scavarelli, WebVR generalist, and "director" of the unknown.
- My graduate advisors for helping make sure what we are doing is grounded in innovation 🙂
Future
Nathaniel and Viola's stories represent two very different but both fascinating journeys that we will talk about more in the coming weeks as we bring in multiple users to explore their stories, and the questions raised by them.
Updates
This update is shorter than most as I'll be mainly going to be delving deep into code, sound integration, integration of the overall project (including our big focus on story portion of the app with 3D character animation generated from the 3D words written in Baybayin) this week. The prototype itself is more than one scene where everything happens (with our landing page, it's 3 main parts taking you to different sets of scenes in the app). I'll also be working on our title/intro and some other business development/marketing/sales stuff like our proposal, marketing video to embed on our website (which has been blank since I wasn't sure if we should have been public about our older prototypes), and livestream schedule on Twitch (I think that's okay since Ebony said that another team was very public on Twitter prior.
Overall we are focused on integration this week. Major updates: we created a whole brand spanking new UI for our controller to be a band influenced by Philippine (some Egyptian) and Pacific Islander type of art, mainly a lot of the tattoos you see in Pacific Islander films like Moana and Philippine art. See the evolution of this below.
1) Team update - we're focused on longer working sessions this week with different individual members to incorporate hopefully full cross-platform development. Although Oculus is focused mainly on VR, we do have AR enabled, but will try to see what we can polish both for Rift in Go in time to show.
2) Technical update - emailing a bunch of folks in the community and figuring out the ML portion of this outside of my own work, still waiting to hear back from people to be able to give feedback on how data capture/collection is most effective. I'll be there to make sure the whole team is integrating and that we are constantly testing as when we had tried another Go build it was not working on some of our devices so we want to be sure that whatever we submit to Rift store is flawless and if we add on Go it is also immaculate on top of our AR. This is challenging trying to do 'all the things,' and I'm glad we can at least submit a Dropbox vid/gifs of what we have cooked up, but want to make sure the functionality is on point as well.
3) Creative update - the UI
Here we have paint, color selection, erase (represented by a broom or in Tagalog we call walis-ting-ting), save capture (aperture), share
Band concept - whiteboard
Band fbx
Band with hands
Will post hopefully next week our fuller prototype which will have both the paint, walk-through of using the controller across all parts of our app, learn, tell (story), and share (shareability of the creations from learn). I'm debating if we combine share and learn into one portion, but share/learn depending on which thing is most optimal for teaching and utilizing Facebook's suite of product (FB live, Facebook Spaces, Oculus Rooms, and 3D posts), would make the most sense to get the most impact from our app.
This update is shorter than most as I'll be mainly going to be delving deep into code, sound integration, integration of the overall project (including our big focus on story portion of the app with 3D character animation generated from the 3D words written in Baybayin) this week. The prototype itself is more than one scene where everything happens (with our landing page, it's 3 main parts taking you to different sets of scenes in the app). I'll also be working on our title/intro and some other business development/marketing/sales stuff like our proposal, marketing video to embed on our website (which has been blank since I wasn't sure if we should have been public about our older prototypes), and livestream schedule on Twitch (I think that's okay since Ebony said that another team was very public on Twitter prior.
Overall we are focused on integration this week. Major updates: we created a whole brand spanking new UI for our controller to be a band influenced by Philippine (some Egyptian) and Pacific Islander type of art, mainly a lot of the tattoos you see in Pacific Islander films like Moana and Philippine art. See the evolution of this below.
1) Team update - we're focused on longer working sessions this week with different individual members to incorporate hopefully full cross-platform development. Although Oculus is focused mainly on VR, we do have AR enabled, but will try to see what we can polish both for Rift in Go in time to show.
2) Technical update - emailing a bunch of folks in the community and figuring out the ML portion of this outside of my own work, still waiting to hear back from people to be able to give feedback on how data capture/collection is most effective. I'll be there to make sure the whole team is integrating and that we are constantly testing as when we had tried another Go build it was not working on some of our devices so we want to be sure that whatever we submit to Rift store is flawless and if we add on Go it is also immaculate on top of our AR. This is challenging trying to do 'all the things,' and I'm glad we can at least submit a Dropbox vid/gifs of what we have cooked up, but want to make sure the functionality is on point as well.
3) Creative update - the UI
Here we have paint, color selection, erase (represented by a broom or in Tagalog we call walis-ting-ting), save capture (aperture), share
Band concept - whiteboard
Band fbx
Band with hands
Will post hopefully next week our fuller prototype which will have both the paint, walk-through of using the controller across all parts of our app, learn, tell (story), and share (shareability of the creations from learn). I'm debating if we combine share and learn into one portion, but share/learn depending on which thing is most optimal for teaching and utilizing Facebook's suite of product (FB live, Facebook Spaces, Oculus Rooms, and 3D posts), would make the most sense to get the most impact from our app.
Neil D. Short
OLP18: Week 10 (Wk 9 N/A)
Project Title: Adventures of PICL Jones
Type: VR Game
Genre: Comedy/Adventure,
Sci-Fi/Western
I
received good feedback on our midpoint check-in and the biggest take away is
that we should make a smaller slice for the prototype. Based on that info I’ve
shifted our focus a bit to a different scene in the game’s story so we can
highlight the dialogue system.
Things
are moving along on the art side. Models are looking good and rigging is in
progress. I’m really pleased with the look of our characters so far.
The developer I was planning
to use didn’t workout so I’m back on the hunt. I’m nervous about our progress
this close to the end, but we’ll keep on going one way or another.
Dev Blog 10
Retreat
We're down to the wire and feeling the pressure! ... In a good way :#
I don't have a lot of time to write but here's a run down of what we've been working on in the past two weeks:
- Opening scene/intro to game plot (still need to record audio but the scene mechanics are working)
- Pairing laser blocking "blade" with touch controller (get our beat saber on!)
- Player health and health regeneration script done (just needs a little tweaking to make sure health doesn't regenerate too fast or slow, also need to decide on how health level might be represented to the player)
- Base Gaia terrain done (I'm a little concerned about getting our AI to walk on it properly, so far they haven't wanted to, but I think it's probably an easy fix like changing the step height of the navmesh or something)
- Snap rotation on our locomotion is working (thank you VRTK!)
- Discovered that SpeedTrees are way more low poly than we initially thought so we'll be using them in our terrain (I'm very glad for this, they're some of the best looking tree assets!)
Pretty smooth sailing in general. There's still a lot to do but right now I'm not overly concerned about much except for this one thing: the AI animation controller. We've been having problems getting the right animations to trigger through Tactical AI for our custom 3D modeled characters. I'll try to figure out a fix this week, but if we're unable to get it working before the deadline, we've got a contingency plan. Basically we'll just use the default Tactical AI ragdoll and play around with its textures so that they look alien-ish and have our custom models included as additional material for the proposal.
That's all I've got for now, here's a screenshot of our Gaia terrain test (soon to have more otherworldly looking trees) and our opening scene 🙂
