Starting with UNITY

For this week in Des 241: Mixed Realities, we delve deeper into these different technology produced realities and what was needed to try and replicate a real experience for a given audience. We were also introduced to the software Unity which is a cross-platform game development engine that allows people to make 3D, AR, VR and many other platforms.

This week's lecture:

What I took away from Mark Billinghurst was his emphasis on the idea of Presence and Perception, in relations to virtual reality. In VR, presence plays a major role in creating a virtual experience as it is the feeling of believing that the user is in a virtual environment. This can be done by creating sensory experiences, having a responsive environment and interactions. In terms of VR, perception is just as important as we need to stimulate the user through sensory technology that help the user to perceive our VR illusion as a real thing.

Our task this week was to download and familiarize ourselves with Unity. This software is slightly similar to that of AR Spark Studio but more complicated in way of sorts with a lot of extra components, making it really confusing for me to wrap my head around.

This is a screenshot of the Unity interface that I took from my laptop that showcases how daunting it looks at the beginning of a project. I hope to be able to navigate myself around this program better in the coming weeks.

#MixedRealities

Billinghurst, M. (2020). Mixed Reality Technology [PowerPoint Slides]. Canvas. https://canvas.auckland.ac.nz/courses/45453/files/5204165?module_item_id=941962