Category: Introduction to Virtual reality

over this semester, I have learnt about what is VR, what it can do and where it could be used. Before coming onto this course, I was still a little bit unsure about what is the differences between VR and AR, but now I’m clear with which is which. During the course except for the theories, I have to get in touch with many different software such as After Effects and unity. I really like the course and enjoyed it very much, I find most of the software alright to get o with work except for After Effect, I just find this so complicated to add different things but I did manage to overcome it by doing the 360 filmmaking project in my team, the process took me a huge amount of time although in the outcome it doesn’t seem a lot.

I really enjoyed Learning and exploring Unity, because I know it is software for making games and the project that we are actually working on is creating a space of our own and we are allowed to run around in it. Unity is one of that software that once you get familiar with it is very easy to use for me. I was sick of the introduction to unity, but I did catch up in the next lesson. During the project, I was more familiar with the tools and did create some very simple objects in unity, and played around with the terrain, making different environments whilst working on the project. For Unity, I think the challenge was I choose to build a huge park, I had to add in so many trees to make it look full, it really took me a long time to do and this makes me wonder if there is a quicker way to add things into the frame other than pulling it up one by one, because the terrain was in different height, therefore I can’t duplicate multiple objects and move them to another place.

Spark AR is a very fun software to play with because there are so many different things that it could do. It’s also software that is very close to our life because almost everyone has Instagram, Facebook or Snapchat etc, and all of them have AR filters on, so it’s kind of making sense of what I’m doing in each step. It was the same thing as unity, once I get used to this, it just turns much easier on what I should do and kind of know if I do this what will happen. But I don’t like the patch part, it was messing me up with which part of the system is right, where I should change, and what can I keep. I think I spend most of my time figuring out how to make the mask open from the middle and show the inside of the avatar. I know how to use Photoshop from my A-level photography course, so this gives me a chance to make a short cut on creating the masks.

I never thought clipping video software can be so hard to understand. After the lesson when I first opened it at home I was blank already and it hasn’t been much time. I couldn’t remember anything from the lesson and from that point I decide to make notes with my phone about different software just in case this happens again. During the project, I looked through several videos and a lot of them are a different version to mine, some buttons are in different places, and it was such a mess in my opinion. However, I did try my best to work with it, I was trying to put some 3D texts and arrows into the 360 videos, but by the end of the interface filter, I was so exhausted, and decide to leave it like that for this time. But if we have to use it again, I will try my best to explore more techniques and still remember to take notes in the lesson.

I’m currently taking notes in most of the technical lessons and in most of the lessons I am able to follow the speed whilst making the change on the computer and noting down each step and what they do. Learning about other Adobe softwares can really help with learing other similar softwares, because many of them have the same keys for doing the same sort of actions in software.

This week is still working on 360 filmmaking.

we had an Academic Support talk in the morning about Time management and working independently, it’s helpful to me because it tells me roughly how long I should be working each week, although I think I might not be able to strict myself to the time that I should be working, but it’s good to know how much work I am been expected in my own time.

In the afternoon, we went to creative tech lab, we get to know what we can do in the lab, what we can book to use and different class that we can go to.

We got in touch with 360 filmmaking using 360 cameras, introduced to what After effects can do and how we can edit our video. I found it a little bit hard and complicated but it’s interesting to learn about the professional video editor. We were also being showed to different types of 360 cameras and how they work, also had a go with connecting a 360 camera to our phone by downloading an app called Theta to see how the video looks like. Then we had a look at an interactive film from black mirror called bendersnatch, which lead us to our first project: 360 filmmaking. Bendersnetch has a lot of different options to choose which will cause different endings, most of the choices lead us to an end, but there’s also options that’s purely for engaging the audience to the film more.

After all, we went onto Stornaway.io had a very quick paly with the website to see how to put the videos together. We spend the rest of the day walking around the school filming different scenes and talking about different ideas we might use for our group project. Our group spend quite a long time on how we can make the film more interesting, so we didn’t have much scene filmed and we decide to take videos in our own time after having a clearer thought of the narrative.

This week we were introduced to the campus (facilities and different websites that we use for our course). After the induction, we were introduced to immersive media. It’s a type of media that was used by the creator that allows the viewer to feel that themselves are in the scene in person. This skill were used in some composition of religious paintings.

E.g. This painting called Holy Trinity by Masaccio shows the viewer and illusion of being present in this particular space. Most of this illusion comes from the composition of the painting, the artist put audience on the ground level, therefore the audience have a strong engaging to the work.

For immersive media nowadays, we have the technical skill called VR that allows people to see works in 360 degrees eg. google map street view.