Week 1 & 2 Update

Research & Development

Over that past two weeks I have split up my time mainly between researching exploitable topics and actually doing practical work. In terms of research I have recently looked at a few academic papers revolving around the implementation of education through the medium of games. Luckily for my case there is a lot of documentation about AR gaming in the field of education. One article by ‘ThingMobiles’ talks about the idea of an ’Augmented Reality Classroom’ and how students will be more motivated to study because of the engaging aspect of augmenting work through gaming, this might be something to expand on in the future. 

Another company I found that had an interesting marketing video was a company called ‘XClaimit’ who had only one video, advertised to me on Instagram of all places. However, it really captured me as the person in the video moves the cards around and the augmented elements were projected on top, this idea of really taking real chemicals into a virtual environment opens so many doors in terms of chemistry and physics.

Off the back of this, I have been putting the finishing touches on my first education based game that will be releasing mid October. After trialing separately with older and  younger demographics it was obvious the game is hitting the correct target market, whereas with the older generation they didn’t see the addictive aspect of the game and just simply found it ‘Novel’. However, the younger audience loved the addictive, repetitive and competitive gameplay aspect and figured out that getting asked the same question, regarding health, over and over again was a very effective way of learning as the ideas get ‘Drilled’ into them.

As for development, I have made a few projects worth noting in the last couple of weeks. Firstly, I started to learn the API for HoloLens in UE4. Learning how HoloLens interacts with UE4 is essential for my future projects which are predominantly going to be based in MR environments. The project wasn’t anything special, It was the UE4 third person template slapped into a mixed reality setting. The main goal was to export the project and make sure it successfully booted and played in the HoloLens hyper-v Emulator.

After developing for HoloLens I was able to get my hands on a new Oculus Quest for VR development. A really beautiful implementation of mobile VR for a consumer market, and the development for it from UE4 wasn’t too hard. The pipeline of shifting projects over to the Quest worked really smoothly, the only thing I’m waiting for now is the LiveLink+ which will allow me to use the headset as a room scaled desktop grade headset.

Alongside the VR development for Quest, I created a couple demos for the device which seemed to turn some heads. Primarily music focused projects, the player is placed in a confined room with a lot of volumetric lighting and atmospherics, using fog and emission. The demo has a 3D stereoscopic song playing, Do you know Squarepusher - Squarepusher, which adds so much to the experience and can really be seen as a stepping stone for a more immersive experience for users. 

Finally, off the topic of games I made some cool things in after effects and projected them in my flat. This was inspired directly by the VR demo and an upcoming collaboration between be and BRANDON VARE, previously he made the soundtrack for [PROJECT 6]. Non of this is really relevant but thought it was cool.