tale – ARSculpture

This project is an AR portal to the top of a cliff that the user can use to explore a virtual mountain area and find a hidden item.

Screenshots:

gifs:

Inspirations:

I used to explore the apartment complex with my friends when I was little. With great creativity, we imagined different worlds and put ourselves into the shoes of various people and living creatures. One of the scenarios was a treasure hunter, a common recreational game that asks for the teamwork among players to obtain hints and find the hidden items.

Inspired by it, I visualized the portal to another world that hid one of the keys (the item the players have to find and collect). Instead of making it vertical like a door to another world, I located the gate on the floor. This was inspired by my another childhood curiosity and creativity regarding manholes. I always wondered what’s at the end of the manhole, as I’ve heard of different usages of manholes like “it’s for sewage” or “it’s a path to access buried cables,” but have never been inside one. As a child, I would imagine the manhole to be something more grand than its actual usage, like serving as a secret transportational tunnel for spies or a portal to another weird interesting world like Wonderland.

Reflecting these childhood imaginations, I narrated the video as if I’m part of a team of two and am following the hints to collect all three keys before other players do.

Process:

I modified free 3D models I downloaded from online in Blender to create the virtual world beyond the portal. Then, I imported those to unity and scripted accordingly using the AR template.

Because it was my first time using Unity to create my own AR project, I spent a large number of hours looking up how to obtain certain effects I wanted. Although I occasionally got annoyed at C# scripting for it not doing what I asked for (at one point, all I was looking for was a constant rotation at a constant speed, which should be able to obtain with a simple line or two of code, but I had no luck and had to satisfy with other alternative effect…), I think situations like that would less frequently happen as I work on more projects on Unity and get use to C# language syntax and the Unity program itself.

Texturing also took a good amount of time, as one of the models refused to show the texture in Unity. Thanks to Hochi, I was able to learn and apply UV mapping and unwrapping in Blender, which I found it very interesting. It also helped me understand why computer graphics course is requiring students to take 3D calculus and matrices before taking it.

Reflection:

Overall, I enjoyed learning Unity and working on this very first AR project, and I’m happy with the outcome of the project. I appreciate everyone in this class for being supportive and providing opportunities to observe and try new things.

tale – ARSketch

Recently I’ve been having this urge of wanting to go travel somewhere in nature, probably even more due to quarantine and global pandemic where everyone is a potential health threat. Here are two ideas that reflect my want of traveling:

1. Exploring Mountain

Sketch on paper:

Brief Explanation:

I’ve only seen carabiner being used in two situations: rock climbing and bag decoration. I wondered what feelings and thoughts would it evoke in people if they saw it, 50 times its size, floating on a street with other pieces of rock.

Sketch with Just a Line :

In all three attempts of trying to record after somehow figuring out to draw with Just a Line app, the app froze and deleted my drawing…(very unfortunate, especially in a cold weather without gloves) I ended up recording my screen instead of using the built in recorder, but I couldn’t attempt to give another shot for the second idea due to the coldness.

2. Exploring Beach

Sketch on paper:

Brief Explanation:

People would often take a sip of a cold drink, whether it be coffee or orange juice, from a bottle like those. Often it is a drink of their choice that makes them happy. I wondered what would it be like if the bottle that is usually for a drink contained fun beach memory instead. Similar to the previous idea, I intend this to be on a street, about 3-4 feet tall.

tale-Assemblage

Gif:

Video:

Comment:

I used the buildings, cat, and a dragonfly 3D models from David O’Reilly’s Everything Library. Instead of applying the corresponding textures, I decided to manipulate Albedo only, making each object recognizable of its original shape. I left the dragonfly model without the texture (hence keeping the Unity’s default pink “I don’t know what the texture is” look), because I’ve noticed that without the texture, Unity only keeps the shape of the model and doesn’t apply other settings like shadows that make the look of the object 3D.

I personally like the stacking of the buildings (especially the igloo) and the collision between the cat and the dragonfly the most in this assemblage. No particular reason for why.

Still shots:

tale-UnityEssentials

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Well I couldn’t fix HDRP so it’s very gloomy and desaturated  from here o.o;;

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Recording did not work at all for me, and when I looked it up about this on Unity forum, apparently it is a bug that hasn’t been really fixed? I tried restarting Unity, resetting layout, etc., but it still gave me the Null Reference Exception error. 🙁

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tale-LookingOutwards-05

Pearl is a VR animation film that tells a life story of a girl name Pearl through the consecutive events that occur in, with, and around the car. The audience always stays inside the car and sees various people come and go. As the film progresses, Pearl’s childhood scenes interweave with the current moments, which not only conveys the idea that her memories have shaped who she is now, but also that she perhaps is reminiscing her childhood, which many people would/could relate to.

What impressed me the most about this is that this short animated film is the piece that showed me what VR can give that no other medium can. I’ve watched many videos and read many articles that state VR will be the new, ultimate, revolutionary medium, yet words by itself didn’t really meant much. I think this film has made an exemplary usage of VR in storytelling.  The story of this film is great, and the producers have made a great choice of using VR to convey the story, as it matches well with the closeness/personal feel of the film.

tale-PhazeroVideo

I’m very motivated by that she self-taught herself and made all those works on her own. One thing that interested me was her choice of not developing/using a character — she explains that often times creating a character also delivers an unintended message or an alternation of what she meant to say to the audience, which I never thought of before.

tale-GPT2

In the future, AIs will not be built to do the job of their human predecessors, but rather to replicate those functions: self-maintenance, self-adaptation and self-improvement. AI as a ‘service’ will no longer be a means to an end, but an end in itself.

The one prerequisite in an automated economy is that most people understand that they need to create the infrastructure and services for the machines to work. Once this infrastructure is in place, people won’t be burdened with the economic and social consequences.

 

Once upon a time, in the first grade, I loved to play football.
I was what you might call a “red zone” player.
That is, when I got the ball near the goal line, I’d take off running and get into the end zone (hopefully without falling on my face).
Then I would play dead. The point is, that I was one of the stars on the team. Or so I thought.
One day, while I was running my usual touchdown run, an angry red dragon flew out of the fog behind me and smacked me in the head with his tail.

tale-Pix2Pix

edges2cats:

(shiny blue eyes +_+)

edges2handbags:

facades:

OMG this is so fun! I never used pix2pix before, so I really enjoyed playing around with these. I wished I knew about this when I was little — I definitely would have spent so much time playing with this.