Introduction
Throughout this semester, I’ve learned new skills in immersive technologies, including VR, AR, MR, and XR. I’ve discovered how these technologies can impact individuals and the world.
To begin with, all of these can be summed up within the Metaverse, which is when all virtual worlds come together under one roof, in an immersive world, that the user can experience from many different perspectives.
Virtual Reality (VR) is the simplest immersive technology, requiring only a head-mounted display (HMD). Users wear the HMD and headphones to become fully immersed in a 3D world of their choice, making it the most immersive form of metaverse technology.
Augmented Reality (AR) has gained global popularity in the last decade, largely due to the success of the game “Pokémon Go.” This AR game allows users to collect Pokémon displayed on their mobile phones in the real world, adding a sense of realism that may not be there on standard mobile or non AR games.
The rapid progression of digital technology in the last decade has made augmented reality more accessible and easier to experiment with, spurring new innovations and bringing in a lot more people to the worlds of augmented reality.
Mixed Reality (MR) blends together the real and digital worlds seamlessly. Examples include Google Glass and Microsoft HoloLens, which overlay digital images onto glasses lenses. Users can interact with these images, such as adding and manipulating digital objects like chairs, tables and anything else that you may be able to think of into the environment, blurring the lines between digital and physical realities and making it seem like one continuous world.
Extended realities, also known as XR, is commonly the umbrella term describing the use of VR, AR and MR. The metaverse could be known as an “extended reality” as it encompasses the whole range of the realities at hand.
Idea Generation:
The idea of my FrameVR project was conceived from there being countless examples of aviation museums and galleries existing in the real world, however there was a notable absence of them within the virtual world, therefore the aim was to capitalize on that gap in the market.
Another reason behind my decision to create a gallery on aviation history is because this is an intriguing area to learn about for many people as aviation plays a key part in the last 120 years of human history, therefore creating a digital gallery which could house up to 8 people at a time could be a very valuable tool in education and teaching as a whole, this brings a whole new level of interactivity that people normally wouldn’t be able to experience.
To help assist my idea generation for my frame VR project I created a small concept sheet, (Figure 1), for how I wanted my gallery to be laid out, I used the rough outline of my gallery and then added text to determine where I wanted to place my different sections.
In addition to this I wanted to give myself a clear picture of how air museums display their planes so that I could re-create it, albeit at a smaller scale due to limitations in space, I did this by creating a Moodboard, (Figure 2), that showcases numerous ways that planes are displayed, and what planes are displayed together, this helped me make my mind up with which specific planes would be situated together.
For my AR project, my initial idea was of a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress taking off from a runway, and then there being multiple cutaways of the plane with internals being shown as well as bombs being dropped, however due to limited time I had to cut the internals being shown portion of my project and only stick to the plane taking off and dropping bombs, however thankfully I was able to complete these two tasks within this project and in the end it worked out smoothly.
A way that I helped give myself ideas for my AR project was a moodboard,(Figure 3), in this moodboard I had my initial ideas of a plane production line, as well as my second and third ideas of cutaways and then a plane mid flight, this helped me further my own ideas and push myself to make new ones that could work out even better.
Challenges I overcame:
Throughout the production of the two tasks, several challenges were encountered, particularly with the WebVR project. The main challenge was making it more immersive, as the large amount of text could be off-putting and hinder progress. To address this, multiple scenes were created for the Cold War section of the gallery. This involved clicking a button,(Figure 4), in front of the planes to select a decade from the 1950s-1990s. This added interactivity significantly enhanced the gallery’s overall quality.
Initially for my FrameVR project, I was going to model the majority, if not all of the planes, however due to certain time constraints, I was unable to succeed in this task, therefore I needed to make the gallery a lot more immersive to enhance my own personal contribution to the project.
I ran into numerous problems when it came to creating my AR project, initially i was planning on using Zapworks for it, and progressed quite far into its development when I came across the first setback, which was animations not exporting correctly to unity, and therefore not exporting to Zapworks either.
I ended up coming to the decision to switch applications and begin using Adobe Aero, i also encountered some problems in this, due to keyframes not being interpreted by the software correctly, however after making sure all keyframes had a start and end position, even if it didn’t have a lot of animation data in-between them, i managed to make all the animations of the separate objects sync together into one coherent animation that works perfectly when using Adobe Aero to record it.
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