Prototyping the Immersive Experience  360 3D Content  Exporting your projects using a 360 degrees setup creates a more interactive way for viewers to view your work, rather than a static camera that is preprogrammed restricting your view. A beneficial feature about 360 degrees content, is that not only can it be viewable on basic device screens through YouTube, but it can also be viewed through a virtual reality headset to make the user feel fully immersed within the scene. Because modelling programs such as Blender allow for the creation of complex shapes, using the 360 degrees camera technique in these would allow for much more advanced scenes to be made as there is around 4 times more that the viewer could look at whenever they want to.  To experiment with this, I made a basic scene with coloured shapes surrounding where the camera would be positioned. This was simple enough, however when trying to create a 360 degrees video, I initially faced a major problem of that it was never working as a 360 interactive video. The view was visible but not interactive as I could not drag to look around. Eventually, I found that the default Windows 11 applications were not seeming compatible, but VLC Media player worked. Using VLC, I was able to look around the scene by dragging along with using the scroll wheel to zoom my field of view in and out. Once you know how it needs to be setup, it is relatively simple to work with, as then it is just designing and animating your scene like normal.  360 degrees content does not have too many negative ethical effects, as they are usually viewed as a video on your screen. The biggest effect would be the environmental impact, as rendering 3D scenes in a high resolution will use a lot of computing power over what could be a very long time depending on the length of animation and size of the scene. This created scene was rendered at a low quality which also helps to save processing time and power. It could be hard for a user to become addicted to these, however viewing them in VR could pose more of a risk than viewing them on a screen as having free access on YouTube means that there are almost endless possibilities of what could be found.  FrameVR FrameVR is a free, online website that can be accessed through smartphones, computers, and virtual reality headsets. It can be used to display 2D images and videos, 3D models, along with text and other features in a setting of your choice. This is a unique way that your portfolio of work can be displayed as the viewer can walk around a gallery of your work and interact with objects to engage in a more interactive and interesting way of seeing your work. Websites can also be displayed within this gallery, meaning that if you already have something online, you can implement it within this new form of portfolio too.  Furniture such as chairs, lights and plants can be added into the scene to make it feel livelier and more colourful than just having your work spread across bland walls. Because multiple people can explore the scene at a time, having furniture placed around can make it seem more like a community setting where viewers can go to enjoy themselves like a real-life gallery.  When a player is within a scene, they can enable both their device microphone and camera to interact with other users that do the same. If an employer was looking through your work, this would be a useful feature to help explain the designs and have a better connection with the employer rather than them looking through a website by themselves or over a screenshare for example.  Although this is not a feature I will use within this project, having the ability to use this for later portfolios will be useful as an alternative way to display work in a more interactive way. With it not being a conventional method of showing work, it could become less accessible to some users especially if they are not very familiar with using technology like this as it could be seen as more of a game.  Immersive User Experience and Augmented Reality 8th Wall 8th Wall is a website that allows for the creation of easy Augmented Reality experiences using their web-based builder. Users can interact with the build by image tracking, QR codes, and simple links. Their website has a main page with many available pre-made projects for different campaigns such as advertising filters and companion programs for museums and books for example.  Once you have made a scene/experience in their builder, you can press play to test on your browser and connect a device by enabling a developer link where you can then test it on your phone. The experiences can be made up of imported 3D models, basic in-program shapes, and imported images. Cameras, lighting, and object physics can be individually added to the scene and objects to create a dynamic environment. This example shown uses object collisions and the use of the “rigidbody” property. Setting the triangles to static and the ball and capsule to dynamic means that they can move around and bounce off the triangles which stay in position. The camera has been set to track the ball, meaning when the experience is played, the user’s view is constantly tracking the ball’s movement. Objects can also be animated to create specific movement, giving the developer the ability to create events that the user can view.  This will be what I should use to create my AR experience. Using custom QR codes or images to open the app will be necessary for users to easily access it, and because it is an online app for both using and creating, it will be easy to access for me while creating it even if I need to on a different device while … Continue reading Lab Exercises