W10 | Specialist Consultation with LinYew & Ronald.

Current Working Plan

City Scape Sketch

Lin Yew

For this week's consultation, I first met up with LinYew and I updated him with my current progress and my working plan for the next few weeks. I told him about the song of my choice and that I've already looked for a music composer to help me out in terms of audio. I also mentioned to him that this music really suited the story and it was the ideal upbeat sound I wanted for the project. He thinks that the music is also pretty suitable and thought that this project could be a linear playback style instead of having user input thus changing the outcome. He questioned whether my film has interaction, at the time, I told him that other than the head tilting motion that the users have to do in order to see certain things in the narrative, the controllers side I have yet to figure out. I'm not sure how does the controller will come into play and that was my biggest concern for the consultation. LinYew introduced me to this reference that showed users can interact with this music video but does not affect the storyline. It was "Netsky - Work It Out" where users are to move the cursor up and down to see changes within the video, these changes are effects/graphics/picture sequence that moves according to the cursor. I think its an interesting concept that I can leverage on to make my video content much more interesting. Based off this type of interaction given as an option, it gave me new inspiration and more ideas when I'm polishing the storyline. I told him I have a dilemma on whether I should create an environment in Unity or I should just render everything in Cinema4D first then convert it to video format. The reason is because I needed the 360 degree head tilt but I had no idea how I can achieve this. Unity's environment is not ideal to use for modelling as I'm not very familiar with the software in terms of this area. LinYew told me that rendering a 360 is possible which it never registered in my mind before, he also mentioned that a fellow course mate did it before with the google VR glasses. Lastly, I showed him my sketch of the city scape I did and he think that I should first finish testing the interaction part and only focus on visuals at the remaining 2 weeks since the highest priority at the moment is to lock down on the interaction. He advised to have a few keyframes for the expected visual outcome and have a walkthrough of the interaction during the final presentation.

Ronald

Next, I met up with Ron and mentioned what LinYew suggested to me and its potential to him and showed him my working plan for the next few weeks. After seeing the reference LinYew showed, he thinks that this type of interaction is best suited on a screen based platform but in VR the possibilities are endless. He thinks that I can explore more in terms of fully utillising the VR assets and also told me that the Oculus Quest is able to detect hand motion as well as audio. He verbally introduced me to this project done by China students few months ago where by its interaction consisted of audio generated interaction. It was about experiencing a Tribal practice in China and the user will need to sing along with the tribal people. When sang together, the environment lights up and the place becomes more and more lively. During the last scene, the user will be floating to the sky, indicating that everyone will return to its natural form with nature. This gave me an insight on how far I can bring this project onwards.

Then I mentioned about the 360 degree video and asked whether it was achievable, and if he has knowledge on it can he share more about it. He told me that 360 degree video is actually very easy to do which gave me an ease of mind but, he also highly emphasised that I have to define why am I using a video texture instead of showcasing the whole 3D environment. Meaning, make/create the narrative in a way that this working method is not questionable. He mentioned that the first person to third person view might disorient users view and disrupt the experience so it is not very recommended. He thinks that if I do this, people might think they are a floating spirit or they are death which it is not in my storyline.

Conclusion

I think that I gained a very clear direction on what I need to do next now that I cleared up some dilemmas I have. I will now start testing the video playback and try rendering a dummy 360 degree environment video as well as layer effects to see if it works.