This week, we had a phone call with Gregg Colburn of the Homelessness Research Initiative. We had a list of questions prepared for him and spoke with him for about an hour. Our questions were focused on understanding the life of a homeless person better. In particular, we asked “If you wanted someone to become more empathetic towards the homeless population, and you could make them go through any life experience, what would that experience be?” and what specific things the homeless population go through that the general public may not be aware of and we should highlight. In general, Gregg’s main concern was on the shelter system. People are often unaware of how brutal the shelter systems are. It’s difficult to find shelter before they fill up and people often have to make tough decisions since it’s necessary to line up early to get space in a shelter. There’s a lot of uncertainty in securing that housing. Even after securing a space for the night, people have the constant fear of having their items stolen. More detailed meeting notes can be found here.
After meeting with Gregg, we were able to get a better sense of the scope of the project. After a quick discussion with Aleks, we ended up changing the storyline behind the project. Instead of having separate experiences that the user can pick and choose between, we created one comprehensive storyline that guides to player through a day in the life of a homeless person. The user will go through a series of scenes that will show them the initial eviction and the start of their homelessness experience, spending a night in the shelter, spending time in a park, and then finally looking for another shelter to stay at for the next night. After coming with this general plan, we met with Aleks again and he gave us feedback and ideas on the specific implementation of the experience. Our updated PRD can be found here. The storyline and implementation document can be found here. We plan on splitting up the four experiences and coming up with a shot list so we know what videos we want to capture and what interactive portions we render.
We were mostly focused on doing more research and nailing down our storyline this past week, but we also made a bit of technical progress. Aaron was able to film a couple VR videos and import them into Unity. He also created a rendered menu within the VR video, which we will can to navigate between the videos! We plan to create a navigation skeleton within Unity so it will be easy to just import the videos once we have them.
