"More Than Meets The Eye" Animated VR Experience

 A breakthrough this week with storyboarding and the idea for narrative. I realised that, as the participants voiceovers were to form part of the experience, I could push this further and edit the semi-structured interviews to create a storyline narrative.  Starting with Sally's world, I've edited her interview in Premiere pro and added in soundtracks of the London Underground in the background. 

 sections for VR in my thesis Scientific romance Science fiction and technology The Invention of Morel - H G Wells, Davidson's Eyes The Invention of Morel and parallels to VR The history of VR VR as an empathetic medium Presence in VR

 Notes: Writing up on Fridays - send small sections to supervisors as and when; rather than large chapters Caroline's comment regarding Sally Booth style - contour lines Sean Ahern and MyDJCAD as part of MyDundee for sound people Each artist's world to have movement and pause points. Camera fly through and then teleport?/action points. Sally's world on the tube could have movement behind the windows Sally's world - exit through the tube doors, into the next world. Link to be found Action points - Aaron strike the bowl - David piano keys which could light up  Match the image to the tone e.g Sally's 'tired head through two strap hanging people' if she finds it humourous then include that in the visual style Prioritise key core visuals through the sound and then use storyboard Dip back into the research questions and print them off and put them on the wall Review research questions to provide touch points in the questions in questionnaires 1 and 2  Send a docum...

 Following feedback I played with the idea of simplicity and created another tree for Aaron's world and replicated a quick version of David's spike. The spike was a commission for a perfume and the tip of the spike was dipped in orange citrus. Replicated oozing lava and citrus smell with dripping orange...making use of depth and height and the lava can drip down to the underground area....

I've emailed the visual tests below to a couple of colleagues, my supervisors, PhD cohort and a couple of friends, to get feedback on the options of style. Feedback so far.. "Hovering in space is so poignant, delicate, fragile and illuminating. I can feel and hear the leaves." "Beautiful, it got me thinking about the tree as a first image and the symbolism of the garden of Eden and banished from the light into a dark world. Also about Adam and Eve seeing their bodies for the first time and the altered perception/sight of themselves. " I really love the simplicity of the middle two clips" "The middle two clips are calming, whereas the others feel too busy"  "The last two are a better style if you want to focus on one object, I could stare at them for ages. Feels like a video game style where it's a beautiful landscape." Supervisory meeting planned for next week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMGmMXDQgzc&list=PLR6NkeqscAx0vkpNLOLZZfYSvNr4NFmsN&index=3

 This clip of an animation in VR is interesting when immersed in it. The scale of the streets is fairly life size, there's action, sound and rain. It's given me some ideas for how large to create the world and how it would be if life size. The interface in Quill theatre is user friendly too, with a selection menu for spawn areas (camera views)

I've positioned images into the 3D VR space, as a quick way to rough out 3D space including depth and height. This gives an instant colour script of the choices of colours I'm planning on using. The next step will involve roughing out the spaces in a rough drawn style. First off was Eros, as an iconic reference for Piccadilly Circus.... Interesting to see Eros compared to the animated tree created recently....and how the style can begin to evolve

Happy accident when creating an emissive material for the tree trunk created in Quill. I applied the Quill Vertex shader to the leaves and experimented with changing the leaves to the emissive material. Clearly had missed most of the frames apart from two. Created an interesting strobe effect, which is something I was hoping to create, to replicate David's wayfinding of touch and objects appearing from negative space

Loose play in Quill today. Animated tree, exported as an animated .fbx file and imported into Unity. Quill Vertex shader applied and Quill Anim Component added to the mesh. Problems to begin with, as the export layer was within a folder. This corrupted the animation, so I separated the layer and  re-exported it. Added post-processing to the main camera in Unity and added a Post-Processing layer and Post-Processing Volume and added a bloom effect to a point light set in the tree

 

 Using 2D images in an immersive environment to create a 3D mood board, including animated elements

 Today's test incorporated a quick mock up of a wire house, made from neon tubing, surrounded by a selection of mood board references. I realised that my working method has evolved from sketch book, to 2D pdfs of digital reference image boards, to now importing those reference images into Quill in a fully immersive 3D environment; with full use of height, width and depth. Starting with something recognisable, in this case a small wire house, I am considering what the viewer may see initially once in the environment. I also imported the animated tree, created a couple of weeks ago and watched the leaves float vertically up toward the portholes above. Reference images imported to see which styles work in VR and which don't. Block, bold colours are emotive, with a strong emphasis on light, vivid colour and shadow.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnG2gOKV9dw&feature=emb_logo Create a cube in Maya. Scale. Select. Mesh Display. Click reverse. Click in viewport. Model becomes black. Display>Polygons>Backface culling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX_iasG6smg&feature=emb_logo Maya>create cube>File>Send to Unity Position and scale - use hatch with magnet snap symbol, in toolbar under scene, to position and snap to the grid Import stock asset - in this case a mug to be continued.... Position the camera so it looks into the scene Remove the default directional light, as this is to be an indoor scene We can either create lights, or we can create an object with an emissive material Right click and create plane Turn off light (lightbulb underneath scene tab) so we can see what we're doing Set scale of plane to X 0.2 Y 1 Z 0.2 Right click on the word Transform (blue) in the inspector>reset position Rotate -90 on the Z axis Position slightly away from the cube wall Create new ...

 https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/unit-7-sound-in-vr?uv=2018.4&courseId=5d955b5dedbc2a319caab9a0#5da89cffedbc2a03c51594e5 Add Oculus Spatializer Plugin Binaural Synthesis - uses a head-related transfer function (HRTF), which accurately simulates how sound arrives at the ears, including the delay between them and appropriate frequency filtering Spatial audio is critical to VR as it reinforces the visuals, helps fill out parts of the world that lie outside the field of view Open the Escape Room vertical slice Edit>ProjectSettings>Audio>SpatializePlugin set to 'OculusSpatializer'. Set DSP Buffer Size to 'Best Latency'. Default speaker mode>Stereo Add a sound to the scene by creating an empty game object and adding an audio source to it Create three empty game objects Select object>add component>AudioSource>Duplicate Game object three times Rename first object 'TeleportSound'>Search for audio file (in this case Escape Room, Audio) drag te...

 https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/unit-5-hand-presence-and-interaction/?courseId=5d955b5dedbc2a319caab9a0&tab=overview&uv=2018.4#5d955988edbc2a23122a1e7d Create hands in VR Search CustomHandLeft and Right. Drag Left onto TrackedAlias>LeftControllerAlias and the same for the right. Look at the inspector for CustomHandLeft. Two scripts are visible. Retain enable for Hand Script. Disable 'OVR grabber' as the VRTK is going to do the grabbing Cubes are no longer required. Do not delete, just disable by unchecking mesh renderer in the inspector These hands are not in the right layer. VRTK will cast rays for the locomotion created in the locomotion and ergonomics tutorials. These rays will hit the hands and we will not be able to teleport anywhere. Select hand>inspector>layer>ignore raycast>yes to change children prompt Save Test in VR Recording below When creating custom hands, make sure that your virtual hands align correctly with real-world hands. This is kno...