3 Mar
For the interaction project, our group discussed several possibilities among which we finally chose the one with the idea of 3D cubes. The other ideas, for example, building an alternate backyard, can be fun as well, but we prefer to play around the flexibility of simple 3D shapes in a limited space and make things creative but also simpler and clearer.
The scene would start from an ordinary room and the participant is able to move around in a room scale. When the participant pick up a calculator or turn on the computer in the room, he will be transported to another alternate world in some way with only the calculator or the computer still in sight. The background will be different from the initial room view. Instead, there will be a lot of 3D cubes floating in the dark which represent the operands and operators or programming statements. The participant can use dragging and throwing to control these cubes and get the result of calculation or run some certain code. The result might be dropped from high in front of him. By reimagining the process of using a calculator and a computer in this 3D way, we would like to create a totally different experience which can be more involved and visualized. And here is our story board written by Ben.
10 Mar
We started form the first realistic bedroom scene. We built the room scene from scratch including picking the proper material and importing furniture models with consistent style. Here we also added the Rigidbody and Collider to the chair so that the chair could be movable and interact with the participant.
After gathering things together, we started to design the light settings to create the feeling of warm and cozy. We made the whole environment relatively dark as the sunset and the light in the room is slight but warm. To highlight the calculator on the desk, we chose a lamp to project light right on the calculator. And the lamp itself was not lit at first, but we put a bulb in it by adding a sphere with emission to make it look natural. We put the staircase in the room to extend the space and create more layers in this scene.
The window is basically an empty object with a collider because we didn’t find proper glass material. Later we also added the curtains to make it more like a window. As for the skybox, we chose a sunset scene to match our whole warm atmosphere. And we adjusted the shadow to make the whole thing more coherent.
14 Mar
For the interaction of changing scenes, Tiger and I were firstly using SceneManeger as follows to shift between two different scenes. It required to build two scenes at the same time and we added a white dot in front of the camera as the cursor. But later since Ben and Yeji used OnMouseDown to play with the visibility in the same scene, we go with their solution considering it’s more convenient to match camera setting in the realistic world and alternate world.
When combining our work together, we decided the light effect on the calculator and made the two scenes more consistent in terms of the objects position and the way of interaction. We also spent time fixing the problems like lost materials and textures as well as some awkward movement of our character. Also, we thought more carefully about some design details and did a little user testing within our group to make the project more complete.
