Build-a-Furniture

This week, I completed stripping the shelf apart to create separate components, as I did with the other two furniture pieces. I also rendered each component from each piece of furniture so that they can be used in the instruction manual. Finally, I added onto the blueprint of shape match from last week to incorporate the shelf, as well as the repetition of each step. This can be seen in the image below. Finally, each component has the coloured symbols placed in the right places and have been exported as GLTF to import into AFrame (~7hrs) This week, I also went to procure a VR headset. With the state of things in the world, I had to be quick to contact Carleton's BIT department but was able to successfully obtain an Oculus Rift to do testing within VR. It took time to set everything up but I got it running in the end, however, I had many difficulties operating the WebVR space. Using the rift is extremely draining and I had several headaches afterwards. As of now, I'm una...

This week saw less direct contribution to the project, and had a greater testing and learning component to it.  Most of my time in the past week was devoted to a different Aframe project that involved a multi-user interaction with a cooperative and competitive component.  I used this project as a guinea pig to test out Networked-Aframe and some more 'advanced' Aframe design patterns (~25 hours). Networked-Aframe is a framework built on top of Aframe that integrates WebSockets and component syncing to streamline the process of creating multi-user Aframe projects.  The main feature of Networked-Aframe we are interested in was the voice chat support, as we feel it could be a great feature to have for playing the game with friends remotely.  However, I also set out to see if there are other features in the framework that could be useful in developing our project.  An element I did find useful was component syncing, which uses HTML <template/> tags to create ...

Up until the Alpha presentation on Friday, I worked on bringing in Maxime's Living Room environment obj-model into Mitchell's A-frame prototype. This required importing the obj, positioning it appropriately, setting materials, and adding some lights into the scene (~2hrs). There were some issues at first with the model being small enough but feeling very cramped; there was not enough space to really build furniture. This model will need to be adjusted in the near future to fix this. Another issue was that the materials were not loading properly and adding lights turned everything black. Some experimentation with the light types, positioning, and intensity helped to solve this to be sufficient enough for the Alpha prototype, which can be seen in the image below. I also worked on helping to try debug the code for the snapping function (~2hrs), which involves a snap to the correct position when two furniture pieces collide at the appropriate location (i.e. table leg touches t...

I finished up on some graphical elements for the user interaction specification component of the proposal due this coming Friday. This includes the storyboard panels and the physical layout diagram. As I was researching Oculus Rift physical setups, I had to determine how many sensors we would need for our game. I believe that 2 sensors will be sufficient, since we do not need a true 360 degrees experience as the Builder player will primarily be focused on the 180 degree space in front of them (i.e. the fireplace, the TV, and building the furniture). Our game is not an action packed game with any running or shooting. Of course, the player will still be able to fully look around but they shouldn't have a great need to move in the other 180 degrees of space. This would also take into consideration accessibility to our game, because it costs extra to buy a third sensor (the Rift only comes with 2) as well as requiring adapters and wire extensions. I spent about 4 hours researching ...

This sprint we focused on the laying the groundwork for the project and writing the design document.   For the design document, I outlined the Technical Requirements, Technical Features, Interaction Features, and created a user experience flow chart (~4-5 hours).   The rest of the sprint was spent testing the JavaScript packages we plan to, or are interested in, implementing in the project (~4-6 hours).    Creating the user experience flow chart took a few iterations as we weren’t certain of the final gameplay.   The current version is fairly linear, but the gameplay is straight forward to make it easy to pick up and play.    A part of the final user experience flow chart. The packages I tested for our project were aframe-extras , aframe-physics , and aframe-click-drag-component .   ‘Extras’, as the name suggests, adds some extra functionality to A-Frame, including controller support, ‘Physics’ adds a physics system, while ‘C...

This week, we decided to focus on finishing the Design Document as a main deliverable for the end of this sprint. Having this complete would help us to better understand our project requirements and develop an adaptable plan. On Friday, we had a group meeting (~0.5hrs) to discuss our specific roles, project scope, milestones, and to create a more defined objective in terms of styling, target audience, and primary educational takeaway. I spent the rest of class time (~3.5hrs) working on writing these details for the Design Document. I also made a visual to illustrate a simplified version of our proposed development schedule, which can be seen in the WEEK 2 introduction blog post . I spent a few hours (~3hrs) researching web sockets, socket.io, and networked-a-frame because we will need to have connectivity and communication between our two platforms (desktop browser and VR headset).  I also wanted to explore how other people created multi-user experiences with A-Frame.  Be...

For the first sprint, I looked into possible control schemes that could be used with A-Frame, then at existing libraries for implementing these controls, and physics systems that could be implemented in A-Frame.  As the initial idea is to have the finder use desktop, we want to support keyboard and mouse, as well as controller (the standard PS/Xbox configuration) based interaction.  Since we were not sure whether A-Frame supports controllers by default I set out to find out what level of support was integrated, and what libraries could be used for controller support. The first step was checking the A-Frame documentation on Interactions and Controllers .  Here I learned that A-Frame fully supports all common VR controllers, but it only supports conventional controllers through custom controllers, however, the library aframe-extras includes code for working with game-pads.  Since implementing our own code for controllers will be time consuming and the A-Frame docume...

It has been established that this VR experience will take place in two different locations by two different users. The warehouse location in for resource gathering, and another location for building. As the primary 3D artist on the team, I've done research on what kind of furniture to use for the context of the experience. I took into account the difficulty of the building process as well as the theme they impose. As a result, it's been decided that a Living Room  is the ideal location for a building environment. I believe that as the experience is more visceral and genuine if the actions you perform match the environments you are in. As such, building simple furniture such as chairs, tables, or shelves make more sense if they are done within the environment they end up inhabiting. Below are a few reference images that I reviewed.            There's a mix of clean, fancy rooms, and messy ones that I looked at for diversity. From my research, th...

For the first sprint, I worked on setting up the Github project with milestones, labels, and populating the board with upcoming tasks to complete. I started a basic structure for the proposal documents (due February 14th) consisting of the two parts: Design Document and User Interaction Specification. I also did research on how real warehouse environments looked like, to start the design process for one of our two game locations. This would be where the user with the Finder role searches for the required parts (i.e. pieces of wood, screws, etc.). Below are some reference images I looked at. It it still too be determined whether the warehouse will be well organized or have some degree of messiness, which would make it more challenging for the user to find items. Something else to consider would be warehouse organization ideas, which is apparently a popular topic that kept popping up while I was doing research. I kept finding articles like the on es below: https://emerge...