Week 7
As we begin to prep for halves, I think our team is starting to have more realizations about what the goals of our project really are. What started off as a project to build a networked VR experience has turned into so much more.
After discussing what we still need to build this week, we realized that we still have an insane amount of work to do to meet our original design goal with not that much time. Iteration, playtesting, and brainstorming would become impossible in our production schedule. All three of which are quite important to our project. This prompted us to think again about what was important to us as we continue through the weeks. We came to the conclusion that, being an exploratory project, our learnings, both personal and team wise, are the most important part of our project. Any project can iterate until they have beautiful complex looking avatars, but not all projects can explore what happens as twenty students venture into the world of networked VR. We’ve figured out that our goal isn’t to continually polish, but more the maximize our learnings. That being said, Nayeon brought up the point that for her, iteration on the landscape and environment is maximizing learnings for her, because she gets to understand how to build a natural and beautiful world while solving some daydream capability issues. This type of thing totally makes sense. What we will not be doing is editing tree models because they don’t seem life-like enough.
Even so, we are powering forward towards halves in a hope to build out the entirety of the spring season.
Nicky and Nayeon have been building out the rest of the models for our project, and they are looking great!
Sharan and Rajeev have been integrating the student interactions including calling for the teacher, taking pictures, planting “flags”, and scavenger hunting.
When the student calls for the teacher, a notification pops up on the teacher’s iPad, indicating the student wants the teacher’s attention.
The student can click the “camera” button to open up a camera of their own in the environment.
When the snap a picture, they have the option of sending it to their teacher, who will receive it in the notifications tab.
The flag planting mechanic we are still working on, but what we plan to have is a green diamond that you throw at objects in the scene. If the you throw correctly and something you are scavenging for, it will hover above the object to indicate you found it.
The scavenger hunt is, simply, the text above the menu. One of the “quests” is fully visible while the other two are grayed out, indicating that you should complete fully visible one first. Once you complete that, the others will become fully visible as well.
