Build-a-Furniture

This week's focus has mainly been on writing the design document and preparing for the alpha prototype (~2hrs). A great majority of the written sections in our proposal is complete while a large chunk of graphics remains to be developed in the coming week. The sooner the design document is complete, the better of an idea we have in how the project will turn out in the end.  On my end, I am responsible for 3D modelling the environments that will be used in the alpha demo. These are also necessary for producing design comps. The environments will be very low poly environments using primitive shapes and basic forms to form the rooms, nothing too extravagant. Below are a few screenshots of the environments in their current state: Living Room (~3hrs) that will be played in VR and the Warehouse (~4hrs) on desktop; all modelled in Maya. Warehouse Back Side Warehouse Front Gate Warehouse Top-Down View Living Room Back View Living Room Front View Living Roo...

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...

This week, our primary focus will be completing the Design Document portion of the Proposal. This will help to guide us in working on the User Interaction Specification document next week. Our Alpha prototype and presentation is also due on the same day (February 14)! Below is a visualization of our current project outlook:

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...

Our goal is to make a cool VR game for Design Studio 3. The main idea involves a collaborative asymmetrical experience to build furniture virtually. There will be two roles in this game: a finder (to look for furniture pieces in the warehouse), and a builder (putting the parts together). We started this project on January 22, 2020 and are currently on our first 1 week sprint of development.