Punching bags and boxing speed balls have a very appealing spring motion that helps visually convey force and speed. The idea is to have the robots built to have the main base and a body attached to a spring. the body can hang back while moving to convey speed and momentum. whilst indicating how hard the bot is being hit whilst also selling attacks by hitting forward with the body. strength of the hits can be calculated with momentum. A possible objective could be to knock the enemy bot off the edge of the arena.
At the end of last project I wrote up a project proposal that goes into more detail about what this might be. Maybe focusing more on telling a story and work that would be able to be submitted to film festivals with VR categories like the Aesthetica film festival I worked in November 2021. With a goal in researching different ways to change the VR users perspective.
Yo-Yo/conkers rhythm game
Beatsaber and recently pistol whip. VRchat fidget toys intimacy and dance, cooperative multiplayer. OSU, Tetris effect. I found using these spring joint fidget toys that select vrchat avatars have on them rather entertaining and make use of VR’s functionality very well. I had a rather zen and intimate moment with someone in VRchat where we danced are fidgets around each other in something similar to a orbital pattern. But have also been catching up online finding work that old school friends had been doing and have become a fan of a friends music and could fit a more fast pace and intense rhythm game. focusing on game theory like flow state.
VRchats SpringJoint fidget toys
2nd person* Robot Fighting
From memories of being very drawn to the rock em sock em robots game as a kid and very disappointed to find out it was less interactive than a thumb-wrestling or game of rock paper scissors. id like to explore the game deign behind Moss like games that I wrote In last years essay on “VR’s 2nd person perspective”. Id also like to use this as a space to explore multiplayer in Unity . I find this idea to be the most scalable and have the largest room for experimentation.
Maya vs Blender I started Following lesion modelling in Maya but after struggling to quickly and effectively get the shapes i wanted I moved over to using Blender for the most part. I found moving between software’s helped me stay motivated when tackling a problem and prevented me from hitting a block when face with frustration.
I started to create the Shade of my character by extruding and subdividing a cylinder. tracing front and side profile images I had drawn in paint tool sai. creating holes where the eyes would be, making sure the edge flow round the eyes flows around the eye. If i where to do this again i would work off a edge smoothed cube as the cylinder object has an irregular number of sides (over 4) on the two apposing faces.
Using the 3 thumbnail designs I chose from the Selection of 20. I then went on to apply the colour theory lectures to them. trying out different colour pallets created in the adobe color website. Then I will go on to tweak and refine the designs and pick the final colours from the pallets.
In setting out to create our own characters that we will later rig and animate in Maya or blender I created a board of themes id like to explore consisting of images taken of google and a couple doodles I made getting familiar with a drawing tablet and shapes.
I didn’t choose the bee life, the bee life chose me. Bee’s have ended up representing me in life and online in a highly creative wink at my name. So I looked at the shapes that made up the Hymenoptera order of insects, circles coming down to a triangle. I played with the descript similarities to the heart symbol and there connection to a monarch, a Queen. looking a dresses, particularly ones that i could incorporate insect wings into the design.
I selected these3 designs to develop because I felt that they conveyed more character in their expressions and appearance I also went in with the .
Over a weekend I watched Arcane the league of legends Netflix animated series and have become mildly obsessed with reading the character pages and short story’s on the fan wiki league universe site. This along side seeing this “character diagram” bellow* on reddit. I thought it would be a good learning exercise to create a interactive diagram/map of all 140+ league characters. Runeterra map
Early last year we quickly went over data sets for unity and hope this will be a good way to revisit those lesions. I found out you can import entire html tables from websites like the LOL wiki into google sheets with ‘=importhtml(“”,”table”,)’.
Using R
Sheets was a very quick and easy way of collecting the data I wanted but from what i understood at the time.
Following along with these tutorials by Dataslice I eventually got my web scraper to collect and combine the datasets I wanted into a table. next step
At this point i would like to fine tune the xpath’s to clear up some of the data. for example in the row created for “Akshan” it recognises ” Gun ” as a background for the character.
Edit: the wiki has since changed this and “Gun” is no longer present on the page.
next steps will be to learn how to utilise datasets in game engine and recreate the map.
In class we looked at the work of forensic architecture I have had the pleasure of seeing their exhibit in London where they recreate 3D environments using the footage gathered in a forensic investigation . They used VR to help visualise time sensitive actions, placing witnesses back into the perspective of there scene and help grow a better understanding of events that unfolded. I find it to be a very interesting use of the technology and its ability to seemingly effortlessly peace together the narrative of these events could be used to better the investigation prosses.
The Vox video bellow goes into so basic details about how AI has race based biases. systemic racism has been an issue plaguing society from the very beginning and requires a lack of thought it is the opposite of racism as it takes more effort on the part of the creator to think of how there systems are used by everyone not just people similar to themselves weather that be those of same race or being able bodied . Its not easy to create systems that include everyone into the design process but it is necessary. Facial recognition can often be under trained on underrepresented groups leading the ai not to recognise there skin colour or face structure.
Hyper reality plays with the idea of a truth where especially in online social media, an example can be told as something that is real and that isn’t the “truth” or howl-truth but from those living in the “lie”.
People use VRChat as an “escape” from reality. away to distance themselves from the truth of there life that may not be to there liking. There are
At first I miss understood what was meant by hyper reality and assumed it meant very realistic. instead of it actually meaning so when I went to find examples i was look for applications like Flight simulator and comparing them to more abstract games like super hexagon but derived from that to make an app useable and interactable come from connections the user makes to there life Esperance and reality .
Cheating the algorithm and Ai
The next american president is a work of art by Gretchen Andrew that uses the title of the piece to hijack google search results to relinquish political presence. She uses her collage’s as a vessel to manipulate search engines. This shows that algorithms and ai can be taken advantage of by altering there data set . I had the thought that whilst training face recognition if you blended the face of humans and 0.0001% of a prawn and slowly raised the percentage of prawn in the image set if eventually the computer wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a human and a prawns face.
Something in your game might look like it does something but when the player goes to interact with it doesn’t do anything. To avoid this create signifiers. If you continue to use a similar material on objects that you can use. Button prompts and lights up halos work to that same effect.
If you want your player to go somewhere in your environment you must use signifiers such as open paths. lit up parts of rooms or obscure sight with particle effect or fog to motivate curiosity.
If you want the player to not go somewhere. make it less interesting placing fewer assets and creating short deadends.
If you want the player to go somewhere later create an interaction but leave hints in sparking wires that need to be fixed or a lock that is clearly presented.
Objects afford certainly learnt interactions in life pushing buttons is a great example as well as looking into a lense like a telescope. every time I see a telescope in VR I look down at it and am disappointed when the lens is a flat low res texture.
