Author: Jedirussian001

Learning to deal with challenges… and not to die trying.

User tests is one of the primordial boxes to tick when it comes to software develop. And dealing with technical difficulties could be any developer worst nightmare. so when you are rushing to have a proper user test done because you do need to study for an exam what could go wrong?

Last week with a week in advanced did set up my user tests and asked for a computer that could hold OCULUS SDK 2 + LEAP MOTION  to run tests, however not only was given a computer were I had to install OCULUS RUNTIME, LEAP MOTION V2 and update UNITY plus wait for someone with admin rights to update the graphic cards, this way loosing precious time because apparently after installing Windows10. 

It did not occurred to no one that that machine should have had been made “OCULUS READY” but in top of that I was given a machine that have multiple graphic cards and it’s an issue that Oculus would not work with a machine that has multiple graphic cards unless it is mapped specifically for the rift according to my knowledge. 

I even tried running an old runtime in my mac and see if I could get the dk2 to work as some youtube videos said.. But nothing.

In times like this when you are being tested by life, the best way to get out of it is to smile.. and so I did. I smiled so hard that it was weird.. but by doing this I found great kindness within myself, the kindness that you feel when you see an overworked man that is sick of apologising, the same kindness my tester subject showed to me when they turned up and couldn’t show them my software and they were excited because it was VR!

And life goes on.. and see you guys next week.

Well a final look to “scene 2” this scene has been the hardest so far, I have created a mini town out of a set I purchased online and I find it delightful, now to adjust some Audio, Mechanics and that should be it.

This blog post it’s dedicated only to portray the testing of what I have done so far, yesterday tested the transition from MAC to PC in UNITY , transferred my scenes from one place to another as my current MAC is not able to handle graphics properly without giving me errors, so took the assets and tested it for the LEAP MOTION and OCULUS.

I was a bit scared that because the core assets of LEAP motion on the store are deprecated I was not sure that it would work on the next machine but after some tweaking it did.

Another week  and two more weeks to go HOORAY!

In this Blog I would like to speak about my progress so far related to the final project in general and what tools I am using  to create  this 3 scenes. for objectivenes I will divide this in parts.

Navigation:

As explained in Log TWO, my focus interest in this narrative is to talk about this 3 elements commonly found within people within the autism spectrum .

• Difficulty with social communication
• Difficulty with social interaction
• Difficulty with social imagination

And so the navigation methods found in every sigle scene are tighly related to the story I would like to tell and I can confirm that  I am using the Leap motion gesture based input to summerge the user within this story but as further the story goes the only gesture he is given to open doors and continue the journey will gradually from scene to scene cease to be.

Scene 1:  I am using nested animations and gesture based recognition to allow the user to continue. in this scene the user have full control but it’s forced to move only forward.

Scene 2: The user  is allowed to navigate the scene by OCULUS RIFT gazing and can use his hands to open the door.

Scene 3: In this scene the player its in a rollercoaster where basically cannot control what happens.

In this Blog I would like to talk about the Programs I am using to create or tweak some of  the assets I am using.

1 ) Crazy Bump / http://www.crazybump.com

This great free to use and open-source program does the heavy lifting on creating reslistic surfaces making your scenes more interesting, This is what I am basing myself on to create my textures. http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-ProceduralMaterial.html

2) ClipGrab / http://clipgrab.org/

One of the challenges I first faced was that I need to have animated movies in the television and in some walls, unfortunately that feature doesn’t exist in the free version of UNITY so to create animated textures and there are in unity a couple of ways you could go on about it, I am using (a) “CLipgrab” to download a movie from youtube and then (b) break the movie into frames in After effects (c) To then use the Automator to name then by number and put them as a texture to create the animation, nice!

3) Photoshop and Illustrator (Adobe) :

This two very versatile pieces of softaware have helped me on constructing the storyboard and to tweak some instances of the assets.

till next week.

This week I have re-Vamped using bump textures and bright colours to make it more enjoyable and fun, I have even added bubbles.

I have added a personnal artwork to sort of explain the scene, wich is to celebrate the  difference between ways of perceiving reality.

Bright colors, “Bloom” and “Ambient occlusion” are the effects used to render the wonders of light effects in this scene.

And have outlined the second level, as well created an animation with unity and the handController from Leap motion and Looks Great. even tho I have managed to create an script for the hand gesture I am having trouble on attaching a Hand controller and moving without the hands either distorting or paralyzing.

This is a Demo even though unity have it’s recognizing the swipe gesture I haven’t included it yet on the trigger-action. but I am satisfied on the final looking of the hands I have imported, size and animation steps for this first level. This is only a Demo let’s remember that using  an IVR headset you could decide where to look at rather than the camera telling you where as this causes headaches and motion sicknes.

This Week I had worked in the animation, passed from week 5 not being able to produce  very believable animations to a pretty believable one using the  “Slow in -Slow out” Technique, my next step on this would be to create a particle system and try to emulate wine filling the glasses.  I am going to try this approach…

As well this week found a way with C code to create animated textures emulating  a T.V broadcasting.

This Week I have focused in the creation of the First scene, for this scene I wanted to create something similar to what Mac Cauley did in  The Night Cafe – An Immersive VR Tribute to Vincent van Gogh.

However  in our conversation I realised that he was working with 3D painting techniques  not available to me, in where you can paint with a brush over the 3d object just like in real life.

And investigating I found a way to get around this with a Photoshop Plug-in, but was too long to implement so in order to save time I am using 3d  models  with “Impressionist” style textures (to emulate  how people within the autisic spectrum perceive the environment around them making it so to be more stimulating for them than human-human interaction wich is the whole point of this scene).

I have implemente 2 out of 3 animations in my scene, and the week after I will  be implementing the gestures to go from animation to animation withing the scene.

Well, well well boys and girls we are 5 weeks into this project already and we have done some nifty stuff, today I have submitted my report and would like to show everyone the storyboard!

• Storyboard1
• Storyboard2
• Storyboard3

I am very proud of it.. it took me ages to finish, but finally it’s here. Whoop!!!