Alpha Presentation, Proposal Document, and Basic Functionality!
This week, our group wrapped up the submission for our alpha presentation and proposal document. With that now completed, everyone including the professor, guest speaker, and the Iohahi:io students can be on the same page with all aspects of the project. Our group has a clear path to begin working towards making this project a reality!
Challenges
One of the challenges I faced this week was attempting to implement new components in A-Frame. I found an add-on through GitHub from Alvin Wan that allows you to turn any primitive object into a low-poly form of it (link: https://github.com/alvinwan/aframe-low-poly). This would have been very helpful for us since low-poly was the art style we wanted to go for and this could have tremendously reduced the workload on the modelers of our group. Unfortunately, after playing around with it for a few hours and trying to figure out why it wasn’t working, I eventually discovered that because it was made a few years ago, it's only compatible with A-Frame version 0.8.0. Since A-Frame has changed a lot since then, given that their newest version is 1.3.0, we figured that even though this low-poly feature could have been very beneficial for us, it was not worth scaling our project to make it compatible with an older version of A-Frame.
Successes
Despite the challenges I faced this week, I had a large success with working on the basic functionalities of our virtual experience. I was able to create a button that changes the environment from day to night, as well as create a way for information to be displayed when the user hovers on an object. These functionalities were shown during the demo of the alpha presentation. Having both of these done gives us a good starting point to develop the tone and mood of our environments, which is important for making an immersive storytelling experience. With the illusion of time passing from day to night and in between time periods, it further emphasizes the idea that the journey it takes to learn about Mohawk culture requires substantial knowledge and information.
Below is a clip from the alpha presentation demo showing the button that changes the environment from day to night.
Next Steps
Lately, I have been thinking of changing some of the functionality. The idea was that instead of having the player view their basket of collected objects at any point of their journey, they would be required to collect all objects before going to the next time period. I think this might make the experience more guided for the user and it will give them the opportunity to explore all aspects of Mohawk culture rather than picking and choosing what they want to know. Especially because all these stories and artefacts are very valuable to the Iohahi:io students, it’s important to keep thinking of their needs with every design decision that’s made. If I were to implement this, the new functionality to work on would be finding a way to track objects being selected and to display something when all objects have been gathered.
Number of Hours Spent: 15
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