In our first week of the class, we all learned more about the structure of the course and brainstormed on ideas we each were interested in individually. In class, we completed two Unity tutorials: Rolling a Ball and building a simple module for a VR headset. We were also given the opportunity to try out all of the different VR and AR hardware components we could develop on. By the end of the week, we were put in teams of four. Our team’s general interests were medical and educational spaces using VR.
In the second week of the class, our team met up multiple times to brainstorm project ideas. We wanted our project to have a social impact and build empathy. Initially, we tried to come up with project ideas that dealt with both the medical and educational spaces, but none of us felt passionate about those project ideas. We ended up deciding that it might be nice to create an immersive experience where people could see how their daily choices impact the environment. However, we felt like this was not a strong enough project idea either. Eventually, we focused on the theme of homelessness. Feeling inspired by the documentary “Seattle is Dying”, we wanted to create an experience where the player can experience what it’s like to be homeless. We spent the rest of the week working on building the website, writing blog posts, and writing the project proposal. We also experimented with mobile AR following a tutorial from Google, creating a mobile app to Augment Faces using ARCore.
