Week 1 consisted entirely of discussions about what we will be creating, on how the roles on our team would be split up. When our project pitched this idea back in the spring, we had a slightly different team composition than we will have going forward. After losing one member and gaining two others, we had to sit down to make sure our team dynamic would work with the proposed goal of the project. So we discussed what each team member would like their role to be to push their career goals. We are:
2 Programmers
1 Technical Artist
1 UI/UX Designer
1 Project Manager
With that being said, we sat down among ourselves and our faculty advisors to decide exactly what our project should focus on going forward. We pitched the idea of making a VR tool that helps beginner sound designers learn different mixing techniques through interactions with a virtual space. Sound Mixing can be quite intimidating to first time sound designers, so our pitch was to explore ways to make this learning process easier through virtual reality. We also pitched that the experience could be a fun toy for experienced sound designers to play around with familiar mixing tools in a VR space.
The question that came up very quickly was “What is our primary objective? A tool for beginners, or a toy for advanced sound designers?” The initial goal was to aim for both. However, we wanted to decide what our primary objective should be in case aiming for both goals becomes too ambitious for us to tackle during the semester.
We also spoke to professionals within the industry to talk with them about our project. No matter which goal we end up deciding to pursue, insight and feedback from professionals will be a must for our project to succeed. The two major points we discussed with them were:
1. What ways do you visualize certain sound mixing concepts in your head (EQ, Compression, etc.)?
2. Would they be willing/able to playtest our experience throughout the semester?
The second question is obvious as we want expert playtesters to test our experience through our development for feedback. Due to our project being fully remote, we want to lock down as many people who have access to Oculus devices to playtest for us. The first question was asked to document how people visualize these sound mixing concepts. When creating our tangible objects to represent these concepts, we want to attempt to connect these objects with visualizations/analogies people used to learn back when they were first delving into sound mixing. If we can find interactable objects that have been commonly used to understand mixing tools, they are more likely to be understood by newcomers. We opened this question up for them to brainstorm throughout the upcoming weeks and get back to us if they come up with anything. Looking to next week, we want to finalize our direction for our experience, and create a gold spike to lock down our development pipeline.