Approach
This week I am shadowing Alex Oliszewski through the University of Iowa VR Club Residency. Thursday to Sunday of last week I met with several members of the VR Club from Iowa along with Jes, and Alex in the ACCAD motion lab. Together we started transforming the space into a VR theatrical experience. There was/is a lot of new terms, skills, and people I have met during the first couple of days. The largest take away thus far has been to take a step back and observe the process and ask as many questions as possible.
Choices Made
I chose to be apart of this project so I could gain on site experience and how emerging technologies could be implemented into a theatre system. An interesting technical system the show is using, incorporates volumetric capture as a replacement for green screens. Outside of the Iowa residency I am developing a system to use projection mapping and motion capture together to project animation on a moving actor. After working with the Iowa residency I might choose a volumetric system to capture the movement of the actor instead of motion capture. After talking to other people involved with the residency, I will also look into a system called "Black Trax". From what I know, Black Trax is similar to motion capture but has a better exclusion rate, meaning, the markers can be temporarily hidden from the receiving cameras and the tracking still computes. I am so grateful I have had the opportunity to be a part of this process. This experience has opened many doors of possibilities, showing there are other people with crazy ideas like myself.
Likely Next Steps
After this experience I have acquired a list of things to look into. One of the top items on the list is looking into Unity. For the residency a large important system element has been Unity. Since being at OSU my understatement of Unity has drastically changed. From what I understood Unity was just a video game making software, but I have learned Unity can be used to make animated shorts, real time rendered visualisation, anything VR, and interactive experiences. I currently have no knowledge of Unity. I can see the potential of using Unity within my own work and would like to learn more about the software.