This week, we are continue working on the MVP. We are trying to put everything together. Now, on our website, you will be able to see the two rooms (meeting room and Lucas's room) for the MVP. However, we do have some problem when we try to deal with Croquet for interactable and movable objects in the room.
What Every Member Did
- Jack: added a scratch for inventory, but had problems with re-parenting in AFRAME. Also implemented some functionality of pressing buttons.
- Zhifu: added textures to different rooms in the model and also refined the precision of the model's measurement and boundries. And I was also working on preparing the roof and water environment for the house model.
- Diana: add objects to both the rooms, including some interactable objects. Due to crashing consistenly, I also compress the images for textures and change a few models so that it works fine now. I also refine display text (hint) for interactable objects
- Sean: Added spatial audio to the room. Working on the synchronization of objects with Physics
Update on Code
Diana: Latest scene and models hosting on gitLab. Here is a video shows the room layout. Note that this is the latest one since we have added superhands and othet interaction since then. But this video give you a good sense of what is happening.
Zhifu: refer to Diana's links and videos which include the house model. And here is another demo video recorded from using the VR headset.
We do meet some problem earlier this week where the website keeps crashing if loaded in Oculus. It works fine with the laptop, but it just always go back to the dog page (crashing page) on Oculus. Thanks to the suggestions given by our mentor Luyang Zhu, we are able to compress the model and compress the texture images to minimize the sizes. We also change some models because some just do not work with Oculus well for no reason. We still do not know why yet, but there is no more crashing after we compressed and changed the models.
Update on Ideas
Here is the hints for Lucas's room.
Plan for next week
Milestone: Achieve MVP, which includes a meeting room and a detailed room with user interactions & group discussion features.
Description: There are some blockers on Croquet part, so our process are slower than expected. For Tuesday's midterm demo, we should try to have some syncable interactions in Lucas's room, and we are trying on that. We will still need to make our project as close to MVP as possible, review designs, and fix any obvious bugs.
Meeting room does not require interactions between the objects and players, but we will need to make sure the users can move around and talk to each other in the room. Audio should be added in (even though this is not in the MVP).
Lucas’s room needs some update, including adding the interactive elements into the scene. Now when the user interacts with the object, for example the book behind the backpack, a info panel needs to be popped out and show what the book is about. This info panel is local, so it does not need to synced via Croquet. The Monalisa arts also have special interactions, which involves when player long enough, it should display text that encourages suicide. There are a lot of objects that need to add interaction, either draggable, movable, and/or explorable. By the end of the week, the room should provide most of the interactivity.
- Jack: keep working on inventory and help with Croquet synchronization
- Zhifu: work along with Diana to add colliders and further refine the model.
- Diana: add colliders; if have time, add images for chat history and facebook page.
- Sean: Working with Jack to try to add synchronization between objects with physical movements
Blockers
- Jack: Re-parenting in AFRAME is not working as expected. In fact, there's an open issue on github regarding this problem.
- Sean: We have successfully enabled synchronization between Oculus and browser, but there are problems when two users are both in Oculus VR mode. We think the problem is due to the different rendering mode in Oculus VR with Glitch and the browser mode in Glitch. We need to discuss with TAs for further progress.