Capstone Week 2 - January 22 - 28

Issues! Get your Technical Issues!

The goal for this week was to iron out how I was going to build the experience within Unity. 

My project needs the following in order to function correctly:

  • Pass-through AR/VR
  • Plane detection
  • Depth sensing
  • Interactable elements such as buttons that can be pushed and objects that can be grabbed

There are several methods to begin developing a pass-through mixed reality experience.

  1. Using Unity's Mixed Reality template (available with Unity version 2022.2.9f1)
    • The downside is that developers cannot see pass-through while testing on the laptop.
    • I would need to build the app and test it on the headset to see how the mixed reality is deployed. 
     
  2. With the Meta Oculus Integration 
    • The downside is that it is more difficult to make interactions such as the raycaster.
  3. Building from scratch with Unity's Interaction Toolkit, which should allow for the app to be built on more devices. 

Ultimately, by the time I needed to check in with the class, my project was corrupted as I tried to mix the Oculus  Integration with the Unity Interaction Toolkit. 

Scavenging for Models

I was able to find a model of the Miami Freedom Tower that was designed in Sketchup.  The designer (RobG) made it available for download, and I definitely downloaded it hoping to save time, but there is always a catch!

The Sketchup file extension was not compatible with Maya, so I needed a way to convert the file without using a "sketchy" site.

I ended up using an extension for Blender called Sketchup Importer 0.23.0, and followed this tutorial to figure out how to add the extension, open the file, and save it as a .fbx file (which can be opened in Maya).

The topolgy for the sketchup file was a bit messy, so I knew this would be an issue that would need to be addressed when I went to add textures.  


Another technical issue was the quality of the shadows.


I was able to make the necessary adjustments by following along with this tutorial. 

At some point I lost some of my textures, and that was because I had not setup a render pipeline. Once I chose Unity's Universal Render Pipeline things got colorful. To fix this I followed this video and just applied a new material to any lingering purple objects. 


 Finally, I plopped the Miami Freedom Tower into a Unity scene, just to get an idea of how a user might see the massive scale of the model from a low angle.  This is going to be a key moment in the experience and I want to work out the any issues early.