VR/AR Fundamentals

Disagree

1. The Future of Church?

I disagree that religion will be integrated with VR in the future because of the fundamental trust aspect of VR. There is something peculiar about listening to people speak in front of you than wearing a device. In addition, I feel that the touching sensation of religion and the expression of emotion during worship is something that makes religion religion. This essence cannot be changed and replaced with VR. Being able to see what other’s feel and the impact it has on them cannot be done holistically through VR.

2.Virtual reality: could it be the next big tool for education?

I disagree that virtual reality is the next big tool in education due to the lack of accessibility to people in poverty. As over 1/7 of the world lives in poverty, this isn’t really realistic as VR costs a lot. In addition, because of this cost, I feel that VR can’t be the tool for education as it doesn’t have the fluidity that the physical world has. While an imagined AR environment might resemble a possibility of VR education, it is still very hypothetical and I don’t think it can be a reality. 

3. Europe Plans 20,000 GPU Supercomputer to Create ‘Digital Twin’ of Earth

I think that this is super impractical and most likely won’t be created due to the funds that need to be utilized. While measuring the climate change is important I feel that the creation of this would create a lot of climate change already. In addition, running this is equivalent to the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) which causes a lot of changes by utilizing sources. Thus because of this, I think that it’s super impractical and cannot be made as the thing would be contradictory to the purpose itself. In addition, building this may not work or would take a lot of time. By the time that new technology comes out, would there be more upgrades to this system which would be more expensive? I don’t think so and if there is it would affect the world in a bad way. 

Agree

1. Sex bots, virtual friends, VR lovers: tech is changing the way we interact, and not always for the better

I agree that tech is changing the ways that people interact. For instance, I have used apps such as Replika to feel artificial intimacy talking with AI engine. While it wasn’t super realistic, the feeling of being cared about with responses was actually somewhat realistic. Furthermore, I felt that the the response was actually very true. I do think that my interaction has changed as I was more focused on text for communication rather than verbal communication. Moreover, I feel that tech does have down factors for interaction where it was more needy. Rather than me approaching Replika, Replika would be more assertive and reach out to me. Despite reaching out to me, I felt that it was trying to be the center piece of my life rather than a supportive system.

2. The Apple VR headset could weigh less than an actual apple

Personally speaking, Apple has surprised me consistently for the past 15 years. They have reinvented the phone, contributed to touch pads and made their devices consistently lightweight. For a lot of their products, they create light versions which are light weight and don’t take too much space. They also have sport versions that are cheaper for normal day use. Thus I think that because of their design philosophy of minimalism and desire for user interface and user experience to be better, they will be able to fulfill this promise of lightweight products. 

3. Marin sheriff’s office expands virtual reality training

While I disagree with VR for education, I think that VR training for specific task forces e.g. police is realistic and is a better simulation than drills that officers do. For example, there may be unpredictable cases in real life that can be mimicked with VR in addition, I feel like if the controllers are modified to resemble objects that cops may use it would be super realistic in training. I think that if this expands to more police systems, it would be the future of training as officers could focus on their craft rather than on training others all the time. 

Project Title: “Yin-Yang: Two Sides of the Five Elements”

Description: Disaster. Peace. Balance.

Time: 5:15

Reflection:

Changes! For the project as a whole, there was a lot of development and change that occurred during the process of creation. There was change in style and plot as well as the approach to the project. Firstly, there was change in the artistic style, story, and focus. Rather than the Japanese 2.5 dimensional style imagined at the beginning of our brainstorm for development, we found that that style was difficult to achieve due to the realistic nature of unity renderings. Thus we modified our plan to be more realistic and with the realistic state of aesthetics our plot changed. The plot changed from someone traveling between the 5 elements to the plot as a showing of nature in disaster (dystopia) and nature in peace (utopia). This is also the change of focus from an individual to nature as a whole. This shift in focus would help create different affects of awareness to the viewer that we wanted to introduce about environment protection.

Skills! Reflecting on the skills learned for the project as a whole, I felt that I became more competent in creating nature scenery, but feel as I still need to improve my competency with the details of villages to create that realistic feeling. Rather than have ghost villages without people or details, I want to make it more lively to create that utopia feeling, especially for my water scene to be more like a beach resort. Furthermore, I feel that I could experiment more with lighting and creating water as water seemed 2 dimensional in my project. Lastly, I want to experiment more with timeline to create the fluidity of a scene like a beach resort scene for water. I did feel that the camera movement was very interesting though as it kind of creates that 3d immersion really strong. 

Collaboration! For the collaboration with my group, I felt that Lavender, Cara, and Vicky were all super collaborative and supportive throughout the entire process. In the beginning, they would always make time for meetings and be open to discussing ideas. When we were working on the projects, I encountered a lot of problems and they didn’t provide any pressure for project completion but rather provided me means to complete the project. For example, when my computer was considered an explosive hazard due to an inflated battery, They wouldn’t pressure me to continue using the computer and complete the scene, but would make sure their scene is done before providing me a computer to use during the night to complete my scene. In this sense, I thank them very much for providing me means to complete assignments. Furthermore, I think that our collaboration was very effective as we were all willing to sacrifice for the project. For instance, Vicky sacrificed more time into creating details for scenes as well as researching VFX with Cara for the portals. Lavender and I would sacrifice time during the nights for editing the video of the final project. In this sense, as we were all willing to do more for certain aspects of the project, we would be able to make it more successful.

Final Thoughts! I felt that the entire project was an amazing experience as I was able to learn so much, collaborate with amazing people, and create an immersive experience. While it was difficult, there was endless support from faculty from Professor Naimark and Dave as well as support from my group mates. We learned together and made sure to survive together. Thus we were able to create this final project!

 

For the final work log, I redid the water scene on my new computer, but had to screen record rather than record through unity due to all the bugs in my scene that couldn’t be fixed. For my scene, I experimented with different types of camera angles and depths of water to illustrate the disaster of drought and flood. 

Before class started on Wednesday, Lavender and I both edited the videos and made sure that the whole video was compiled as one entity. We didn’t have the metal peaceful scene as there was a bug with Vicky’s unity. For the video, I compiled the order and made the transitions while Lavender added sound. 

Since my computer was classified as an explosive hazard last week, I didn’t have the ability to really change much within my scene. I added a bit of detail in terms of boats, water and other stuff like that but otherwise didn’t really. For sound effects, I found some with Lavender. As for the scene I was in charge of I created the video for water.

 

For what I will do before the final video is shown in class, I plan on completing and refining the disparity of my scene in terms of sound and visuals. I want to make the displacement more apparent for the 3d effect. In addition I will have to record according to what the group says. Lastly, I plan on doing the work of editing for the final version where I want to make sure all the details of the video e.g. sound are perfect.

For week 5 of production, our group focused on creating the 3d imagery in which part of my time spent was reviewing the 3d effect from the projector for our project. 

For my own scene with water, I created it in a terrain but there were a lot of errors within the file. For this reason, my computer couldn’t run the animated file. Of course, there was also the alternative way of just playing the video not in full screen, but the problem with that isn’t the animation part but rather it has to do with my computer having a vented battery which could explode if overheated. This diagnosis from IT led me to not use my own computer for unity as it might affect the safety of myself and those around me. 

For VR/AR, I struggled a lot with utilizing VR as it would consistently crash as well as because I struggled with storage problems where my computer had restarted 3 times and my progress unsaved due to having to force quit. Essentially this deleted any progress I had in Unity despite spending a lot of time on it. 

Having only limited photos of the created progress, I was in the progress of creating the island terrain before it ultimately had a bug that caused the terrain to disappear when I imported an asset. It looked something like this and disappeared. 

Other than Unity, I created the model for the Bagua that we will be using in Rhinoceros and tried to render it in Rhinoceros and Keyshot and see if the textures can be transmitted, but there was no success in doing so. Therefore, we would have to put the textures within Unity itself. 

For the Project Storyboard and Timeline, it’s in the PPT from page 11 onwards. Essentially, we wanted to make it revolving around the aftermath of disasters. Moreover, as we wanted to plan ahead, we wanted to be ambitious and try to complete the unity aspect within 2 weeks before furnishing it the last two weeks. An upcoming task for myself is to make a 3d model.

 

See the link for the whole storyboard and timeline.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1IFoiNFZ0N3HIBBah_Xc2ktsvllhc0h9Mxl9iYo4gnWo/edit?usp=sharing

For the second week of individual assignments, I wanted to experiment with one of the concepts we had before: shadow art. I utilized a model from Adobe Mixamo to complete the animation and wanted to use different lighting such as directional lighting, spot lights and point lights to create different variety of shadows. These shadows might inform our final project as it was a key idea of ukiyo-e that we wanted to express where the characters didn’t have to be holistically designed in terms of aesthetics. Moreover, I also used some different lighting to create some depth that might be used to inform our project. Essentially, this assignment provided me an understanding of Mixamo avatar animation which is difficult to complete due to the precision of joint movement, an understanding of how shadow and light interacted within unity which was a realtime rendering engine, and a basis for creating light designs in unity.

 

For this week’s assignment, it was an exercise that had to do with experimenting with unity and seeing the capabilities. At first, I thought about creating a model within unity, but I found that unity itself was very limited in terms of building resources which is most likely due to me learning it recently. Because I wasn’t familiar with the movement, shortcuts, or construction methods, I felt that it wasn’t that beneficial to construct something within Unity as the proportions may be incorrect and I wouldn’t have a big idea about the measurements. Therefore, when I realized that this was the case, I tried to pull my 3d model I created in Rhinoceros onto Unity, but would find out that it didn’t work as a Rhino file. In order for 3d models to be accepted by Unity, I learned that I had to convert my file to obj, fbx, 3dm, and other file types. As I had previously created 3d models before, I just used an Arduino, breadboard, and battery model I created with multiple layers to represent the various components. 

I also experimented with seeing how the rendering of models is different between rendering applications like Keyshot9 and Unity which is where real-time rendering occurs. It could be seen that there is clear difference of clarity between the two where the Keyshot version (the first one below) is clear with the textures defined clearly. Thus I found that the difference in clarity could be utilized may be utilized to create more two dimensional type of features that my group may want to experiment with to create 2.5 d experience. 

Having added the model, I wanted to create a deconstruction of the Arduino where I made different movement of the pieces with changes to the scale as it expanded up. This can be seen in the presentation through video of the exercise. 

 

From this experimentation with Unity, I learned the following : 1. Certain file types are needed for unity to process it, 2. The render isn’t that realistic, 3. Animation of objects in layers can be linked through creating an empty object layer, 4. Unless the computer processor is very developed, the graphics will be somewhat lackluster. 

Le Petit Chef is a restaurant brand that specializes in immersive dining experiences where customers will experience seeing the making of a dish at their table top. There is a mini chef that appears on the table and is 58mm that interacts on the plate of the customer.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEFmHntzb0M)

The chef may be on the side preparing the food of the individual and the projector would show realistic food being made that appears to have form. The chef may also walk on top of the plate which creates the illusion of dimensionality as seen in 2:15-2:19. As the dining experience is projection based, the visuals become immersive within an environment which develop the user experience.

 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEFmHntzb0M)

For how this relates to the final project idea, it relates to having objects on frames and having interaction within the frame. While this isn’t a standard picture frame, the white plate does become this frame that shows the food being projected and interacted with. This would also relate to having creatures or people on the plate as there was people at one point of the video where they talked and welcomed the guest to the dining room from 1:57-2:07.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEFmHntzb0M)

I think that this would inform my final project in ways such as but not limited to utilizing physical objects on the wall itself such as plates, 3d laser cut acrylic with intricate design to frame the movement of the subjects in frames, and using one background.