Saturday SAVY, Day 2 – “Building Virtual Worlds” (7th/8th)
On Saturday, our Building Virtual Worlds session opened with a lecture on ways to experimentally test multisensory processing in a neuroscience lab, followed by a hands-on demonstration, and a discussion of how a lab like ours goes about simulating spatial audio in a practical sense. For the remainder of the day, our students continued to improve their Unity projects, with an emphasis on importing more interesting assets, fixing bugs, adding movement controls, and sound, with occasional breaks for demos in our immersive cave space.
By the end of the day, all our groups had created simple Unity projects containing a high-resolution three-dimensional scene with moving elements, simple control over camera movement through the scene from a first-person perspective, and controlled by a C# script. Our students did a great job of helping each other (and even at times helping our staff) solve bugs and other issues in their projects.
Next week, for our final class, the student projects will be moving into our cave environment, taking advantage of our unique combination of a high-resolution projection system, spatial audio, and motion tracking setup. We anticipate a lot of laughs and a lot of learning.
Some dinner table questions:
- What are two types of differences between the sounds that arrive at the two ears? How can these be used to simulate sound sources from many different directions?
- What good do the outer ears (the pinna) do for our sense of hearing?
- What would you most like to fix in your Unity scene, or add to it, before you put it in the cave?
We look forward to continuing our journey of building virtual worlds next week!