Week 5 – More detail in design and tech demo

mincany

This week, the team worked hard to prepare for our half presentation during Week 7.

First, we finalized all the branding components including logo, poster, and half sheet.

Figure 1: Hermes Poster
Figure 2: Hermes Half-sheet

We made a big breakthrough in the design perspective, which includes a detailed design on how the VR player should interact with the world and how the immersive room player can interact with the VR player.

Figure 3 : VR player interaction design
Figure 4: Immersion Room interaction design

As shown in Figure 3, the VR player rows the boat on the Amazon river, and his goal is to record landmarks with a camera and communicate with Amazon indigenous tribes life. This information is then communicated to the research team (players in immersion room) to document and analyze. Players in the 3-wall immersion room will need to use the existing research to guide and instruct the VR player through the whole journey (as shown in Figure 4). Now with a more detailed design, team is able to more forward and move fast toward creating a playable tech demo by week 7.

Figure 5: VR player’s camera UI

As previously mentioned, the VR player will use a camera to record landmarks. Provideing a clear and instructive UI for the camera is crucial for the VR player’s guidance. The first UI design for the camera is shown in Figure 5. This design will be iterated and improved.

Implementation of the aforementioned designs has begun with the programmers and artists. Our programmers have configured the HTC Vive controllers input to imitate rowing boat on river. Meanwhile, our tech artist has started working on building up the aesthetic of the scene. The scene shown in Figure 6 was built with terrain editor, procedurally generated trees and physics-enabled river.

Basic implementation of rowing boat in VR
Figure 6: Demonstration of virtual environment

For next week, we are planning to:

  1. Keep iterating on the camera interface and interactions
  2. Putting the VR rowing boat mechanism in the scene
  3. Develop the camera recording mechanism and put real world imagery playing in camera
  4. Develop interface on the immersive room side so that players can interact with the 3 walls and receive videos recorded from VR player side
  5. Keep working on story
  6. Putting everything together for the ½ presentation