Week 4: Oculus Launch Pad 2018 - Due July 30 @ 11am PST

[Anonymous]

Let's Keep It Going - Week 4!

As a reminder, Keep It short and sweet unless you feel really excited! We won't mind reading the details. 

[VRdevCat]

Week 4 - OLP Dev Blog

Katherine Mimnaugh 
@VRdevCat 
Katiemimnaugh@gmail.com 

Projects: #Murder with Nir Netzer and LumaVR with Jasmine Roberts

Updates: Last week I finalized the details on moving to Tilburg University in Holland to start a PhD in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence in August, so it was my week off for the blog post. I am somewhat sad to have made the decision not to spearhead my own project, but the projects that I have been involved with are amazing and it's been a true honor to have been asked to work on them. Brainstorming with Nir was fun yet technologically difficult at times and I am really excited by the direction that Jasmine is going in. 

Last year, I helped a small student team at my school create a first-person VR film about the experiences of Sandra Bland. This coming Sunday, we will be showing the VR film as part of an event about the public health impacts of exposure to gun violence for residents of Englewood in Chicago. Sandy's mom, who gave us permission to create the VR film and really liked our work, may be attending. Though I am happy to be able to support the team, share the work and get feedback from viewers about the piece, I feel a deep pile of conflicting emotions. I personally feel it is irresponsible to make the VR film available online where it can be viewed without context and without a discussion with viewers before they start to make sure that it won't cause trauma. In this context, we can get direct feedback on the questions that concern me.. Does the VR film change minds, open eyes and increase empathy? Does it provide value to those who already empathize? Does it actually honor her memory or create justice for her? Finding answers to these questions will help me grow as a dev passionate about empowering social justice with 360 filmmaking in appropriate and powerful ways and to create better work in the future.

I have really enjoyed the 360 film coaching sessions with Nathalie and the chance to explore questions about first person VR films. I am constantly awed by her knowledge and talent and grateful to have the chance to learn from her. This whole program has really blown me away in the connections that I've been able to make the opportunities that have opened up as a result. I am really grateful to be part of OLP! 

Tot ziens,
Katherine

[maxellinger]

This week wasn't too exciting. I went to Seattle to visit my partner on his birthday. He was there for a workshop, and the distance from my project seemed like it might be useful. On the drive I had a kind of panic about what I was going to do, whether or not pursuing this given the uncertainty around funding was the most responsible adult decision to be making. I entertained the idea of trying to make other things that could be more potentially lucrative. Ultimately though, this has been my dream for a long time — and starting out with the most unapologetically Max thing seems like a smart decision in some ways. People can copy your silly quick-flip startup idea, but nobody can make the same exact art as you. I think.

On the project side, I prepared some of my midweek check-in materials. The budget was hard, because at the end of the day I just want to see my ideas translated with enough fidelity as not to distract from them — and honestly that could maybe happen at a variety of different scopes. I ended up pretending like I was still scoping projects for my old agency job and not over-thinking too much ("Will Oculus fund it at this amount? Well actually QA seems important...").

I also finished my one-page summary of what I was making. I sent it to a journalist friend for feedback and he said "This sounds amazing and you should absolutely do it. It sounds like gay Portal in VR and I'm here for it" and so that was encouraging. 

I had supported the Queerskins VR Kickstarter back in December and we finally got digital downloads of that. It's sort-of similar to what I'm building, and it was encouraging to see it along with the success it had at festivals. I feel like some of what I'm doing is building on it, in terms of what it's trying, so that was neat. The Sundance call was really encouraging too. 

I finally locked down the studio I'm shooting at. There's a pretty affordable place in Berkeley that has a full green-screen and lighting cage. 

I'm also continuing to develop my understanding of Unity and the Timeline tool, of which most of my project will be based on. I didn't get as far as I wanted to in putting content on it (I hit a snag with getting a glowing orb shader to work properly with HDR turned on and having it pulsate to dynamic audio tracks) but I'm hopeful this will be a very productive week.  

[shashkes]

Emovji is an asynchronous messenger platform that let's you send your movements to friends and loved ones. This week we worked on our UI. Our design principles are focused on using your movements also for content creation - no remote buttons or pointing at menus.

we wanted to create a naturalistic environment without straight angles and have the environment react to your movements by following your hands or head.  

you can read more on our patreon 

https://www.patreon.com/posts/20404716

[meredithwilson]

Dev Blog 4 

Working Title: Retreat

I don’t have too much to report this week since I’ve been busy finishing up some Unity contract work. My lead 3D modeler and animator Robert figured out how to swap out the head of a fully animated character from the asset store with one of our original 3D model heads so that we won't have to go through the trouble of rigging and animating a whole new character. It really helps with our production schedule to not have to rig and animate the whole body of every single character. Any time saved is a good thing at this point 🙂 

Right now the thing I’m most nervous about are getting the enemy AI for our FPS to behave the way I want them to. I’ve always been interested in game AI but so far haven’t had a lot of exposure developing for it, and for this project we’re going to need some pretty sophisticated AI behavior. Supposedly the TacticalAI asset will really help with that but I still anticipate some kind of learning curve. 

That’s all I’ve got for now, I’ll be working hard this week to make blog worthy progress!

[aa_lique]

4th week
072718 -
This week’s Goals:
- Finish basic development & layout of environment
- Load environment into Unity
- laying out the mechanics; navigation
- Check out set-ups and mechanics from other projects /lessons and tutorials about different mechanics
- Work on the OculusDNP
- Research for water character
- Search for animated assets to use as placeholders if necessary
- developing art for environment

This is a scene from the tunnel.

Still refining with the environment model in Maya and loading into Unity to begin work on navigation and dynamics
Re: Mechanics:

    * I'm deciding if it is better and less expensive re: memory-wise & optimization to either:


1. create one small structure and use separate scenes and navigate from scene to scene.  Is that how Virtual Virtual was created?


   OR
   
2. to create the entire environment in one scene and navigate thru the structure seamlessly w/o loading new scene in each time.


    * Navigation:

1. Waypoint teleportation
   OR
   
2. Freeflow to let the visitor moving around freely  


Opting to go with 1st choices  of1 entire environment and waypoint because I want to move seamlessly not having to load and reload data.

Most of this weeks Goals were met except the sketches for the character and testing which are priority for this week.

Next week’s Goals:
- [ ] !!Refining the mechanics: navigation and testing on GO!!
- [ ] Sketch for water character or find asset placeholder. Received advice to keep it bipedal to keep it simpler execution for motion-capture
- [ ] Working on the art and refining the model (keeping it simple)
Also investigate Vector
- [ ] Create website
- [ ] Follow-up on leads for MoCap
- [ ] Work on OculusDNP

[QuixoticHero]

Blue Yonder Falls Development update week 4.

Much like last week, work in the priority has filled most of the time for me to work on the project. That and a couple of other things, one was showing off one of the project off an an event, which gave me a window quality test locomotion. Lastly, which ended earlier today, I did partake in a hackathon creating a education app.

Here's the vLog week 4:
https://youtu.be/aFluc2R93gY ;

[CuratedxKai]

Hey everyone!

This week I was invited to speak at the 2018 HUE Design Summit in Atlanta, GA. The event brought together black creatives from the design ecosystem to discuss the past, present & future of designing cultural heritages. 

Most of the designers present had never used VR. During my session on the future of cultural design, we discussed the need for more PoC to not only be consumers of VR, but to take an active role in designing content to ensure their cultural heritage was accurately represented in new digital mediums. Participants got to try mobile VR experiences, an introduction to Unity, and the Oculus Go. 

It was great to have creative feedback on my previous VR prototypes + contribute towards creating a safe space dedicated to discussions around the importance of our voices being included in the future of design. I'm hoping a few members of the group can join my team when it comes time to begin prototyping my Launchpad 360 project. 

Check out this video of us taking design from canvas and brush to virtual spaces. 
https://youtu.be/bZs1pg-ldWA

Have a great week everyone!
-Kai 

[lildub]

We decided to do a video so our narrative writer could focus on our characters because I've always struggled with writing and come from a video background so here's a vlog format dev blog post 🙂 (first min is intro to the project)

[charlesniu]

Project Locomoto Development Blog #5: 
Creating Cosmonote

Hi Launchpad,

Following up on the feedback I got from demoing my "Music Mountain" prototype last week, this week I got rid of the climbing picks, and I'm shifting in a slightly new direction - I'm calling it "Cosmonote." Cosmonote will be a rhythm-matching VR game which will have players "climbing through constellations." Here's a short video of this week's development progress, which focused on level editing, saving/loading, and simplifying core gameplay mechanics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzMxU_I6KcA&feature=youtu.be

As usual, for a more detailed report on the challenges I faced and the thought processes I followed to address them, I have this week's Medium blog: https://medium.com/@projectlocomoto/developer-blog-5-creating-cosmonote-38cff3235ae8

Thanks for checking it out, see you next week!

Charles

[madomfeh]

Week 4:

This week I reached out to several quill experts for their guidance on integrations of quill and unreal engine. I was able to get some feedback on the concept/storyline from niko and a few other experienced musicians too. So far so good!
I also experimented with the visualizer and linked some color/light spectrum feedback to the sound input to make it more interesting.

Vr Visualizer with different color spectrums matched to sound input (edit from cube to triangles):

https://youtu.be/Z_cQvhhtyjM

additional visual:
https://youtu.be/JPGUEU1ZTYQ

Test of Post Processing on based on Player Vicinity/Point of View.

(More Vibrant as the player gets closer):

https://youtu.be/24_R1QlNTwM

I didn't get the opportunity to integrate puzzle logic yet, so that is the next step along with the Quillustration implement.

Have a great week!!