A major milestone that we had set for us was to create a playable demo of our experience to see how our assets were able to be integrated within the world. Initially, we wanted to be able to show a completed first section of our story, however we were unable to get as far as we had hoped. That being said, we were able to incorporate key items from our experience into our project room:
We were able to have a placeholder portal spawn on one of our project room walls. It was able to track consistently as we walked around the room.
We were able to have a virtual file spawn on our physical desk, and have it open based on our hand interaction almost without fail.
interacting with a virtual file on a physical desk
In addition to the file mechanic, we were able to superimpose a virtual stamp onto the Magic Leap controller. As we covered in previous weeks, a grab-hold-move mechanic within the AR space currently is not viable in terms of immediate fluidity, accuracy, and feedback. Seeing as how the guest’s choice, whether to redeem a character or not, is such an integral and powerful part of our story, we needed to make sure that this mechanic is as impactful as it can be. An idea that came up was to use the Magic Leap controller as a physical prop. It has a solid weight to it, and treating it as a stamping mechanism helped bring the virtual and real worlds together. As you can see, the stamp reacts to the virtual file, but it will also react with physical surfaces as well, just to add that extra bit of immersion.
In addition, we were able to utilize the hardware controller for another use. Early on, we realized that, while environment mapping is robust, the hardware or software can’t actually recognize individual items. Each surface that is mapped is exactly that, a surface. Since our experience revolves around a physical table in the guest’s space, we needed the ability to recognize the location of said table. What we came up with was a system where we ask the guest to place the controller on their table. The Magic Leap would then recognize that the surface that the controller is on is the main “Table”, and center the experience around that surface.
While we are not as far into our process ad we’d like, we definitely were able to make enough progress to feel comfortable going into Halves next week, where we would make a presentation to the entirety of the ETC Faculty about the current state of our project.