I raced to get a new version of Be_A_Bird_VR ready for more user testing and got it done just in the nick of time. https://youtu.be/N1_mIcqkmH4?t=636 User feedback was pretty good. User 2 seemed contented to ascend to a great height and just glide around — completely ignoring the berries. User…

Having recorded the 360 video that constitutes the conclusion of the Be A Bird VR experience, this week I had to figure out how to “ultra key” out the green screen in Adobe Premiere and then export it, with alpha channel, in one of the two formats that the Unity video player can handle: Apple Pro Res 4444 — which the university computers don’t seem to have or H.264 — which doesn’t seem to carry the transparency information.

Today I used the Insta 360 Pro2 camera and a Zoom (H3-VR) 360 degree VR audio recorder ambisonic sound mic, recorder and decoder to do some green screen filming using the London College of Communication’s facilities. I had to get everything done in record time because, while I had a…

This week I ditched the flight dynamics and started working on the aesthetics. Flying over the clouds in an aeroplane can be mesmerizing. Imagine how it would feel without the plane. Just you, gliding on the winds, high in the sky. …

I spent a long time over the summer mulling over a tricky flight problem and after many laps of the local park, flapping my arms like a bird to get into the appropriate mindset, I finally cracked it. The Gliding Problem [ NB the PLAYER spends the whole experience lying…

Yesterday was a brilliant day. After weeks of doing laps around the park over the summer racking my brain for a solution to my tailspin problem (see previous blog) the remedy I came up with took under and hour to implement. Dot product essentially measures the degree to which two…

The final week, predictably enough, involved ironing out the last remaining bugs before submission. For example, in trying to make scene 1 look more aesthetically pleasing (matching fog colour to skybox lighting, tweaking the materials of the landscape, floor tiles and statue so that it looked more blended) I ended…

This week primarily revolved around re-creating scene 3 so that it placed less pressure on the graphics card because the builds would only last 5–10s before it would crash. This was mainly because the L-system trees were each composed of several hundreds of individual parts. So while Žan was encouraging…

This week I ushered in the rest of the user testing, did a preliminary analysis and started making the suggested changes. This was also the week where I tweaked the boid script — that enabled a boid to be clicked (OnMouseButtonDown) and then a target pole to be clicked to…