Saturday, SAVY Day 1 “Building Virtual Worlds” (7th/8th)
We began day one of “Building Virtual Worlds” with two lectures, one from Mark Wallace, our lab’s principal investigator, and Adam Tiesman, one of our PhD students. They gave a bird’s-eye view of the multisensory processes that our lab studies, and the neuroscience of sensation and perception. Then we brought students into our multisensory cave space, where they will be testing out their virtual worlds, and showed off some of our tech, in particular showing how using shutter glasses allows us to present stereoscopic 3D images on our walls and floor.
We then had students work in teams on the first steps of building their virtual world: introducing them to the Unity game engine and letting them choose between different free environments available on the Unity Asset Store. Here we ran into an unexpected technical hurdle, with some environments not compatible with the more modern rendering pipeline available in Unity, and a chunk of the remaining time before lunch was spent troubleshooting this. After lunch, we returned and had students introduce simple movement controls to their scenes.
Next week, students will be refining the visuals and movement in their scenes, and introducing spatialized audio, as well as learning more about the technology that allows us to present these multisensory worlds and the scientific motivation for doing so. In the final week, we will be introducing simple motion tracking and have students present their worlds in the cave itself.
Some dinner table questions:
- How do shutter glasses work? Related bonus question: Why do pigeons bob their head back and forth when they move?
- What was the most difficult part of the workflow in setting up your virtual world?
- What would you like to add to the world to make it a more interesting experience? Do you foresee any problems moving from a computer monitor to our 3D cave?
Marcus Watson