This week we focused on finalizing our application design and overview. We decided on the specifics of the experiences we want to implement, and thought more about our prioritization of tasks and general plan. We’re going to meet early next week with Gregg Colburn, one of the co-leads of the UW Homelessness Research Initiative. Our meeting with him will hopefully validate the decisions we’ve made, and we will of course adjust our plan as needed.
We spent a good amount of time researching homelessness and the various experiences of people who are experiencing homelessness. We watched the YouTube videos that were recommended in our project proposal feedback (Becoming Homeless, a Human Experience and See Life From a Homeless Perspective). We also watched a presentation put on by the Seattle Times: 9 Intimate Stories of Homelessness. This made us think more about ensuring we don’t fall into stereotype narratives, so we are very interested in getting feedback from Gregg.
We have decided to break into two groups of two to start implementing the different scenes of our application. Aaron and Erika will start by working on the Seattle map scene. To do this we will need to load GIS data into Unity and get the map appropriately sized and located. Alison and Amy will start working on our first experience. The first interactive experience we are implementing is selecting food at a food bank. We decided to start with this scene because we wanted to wait until after our meeting with Gregg to start modeling a homeless encampment. There are also a lot of assets to get us started with this scene, so it seemed like an easier place to start.
We also received our 3D video camera and Google Cardboard from Steve. We got a sample video of the CSE2 atrium working, and will continue watching videos on YouTube VR to get a sense of the types of videos we want to record. We plan on reaching out to some organizations to see if we can get access to record their space.
