Project Umbra is a VR experience that was designed to give prospective students, and potentially tourist's, a detailed idea of what Savannah has to offer them. The project was apart of SCAD's CLC (Collaborative Learning Center), which is a program that is intended to bring people across several majors to work on a single project. In order to even participate students must apply for an interview and be selected by the teacher who is leading the specific class. My roles on the project included: Producer, LeapMotion Lead, UI Element Designer, SCRUM Lead, Voice Actor, Researcher, and several other small roles.
The purpose of the VR experience was to highlight important areas, buildings, and venues in order to help prospective and new students get a lay of the land in Savannah. With some examples of the things we decided to highlight include: Hospitals, Food Venues, Entertainment Venues, and SCAD Buildings.
And to better highlight SCAD we recorded 360 videos of SCAD Buildings, Events, and key locations frequented by SCAD students. And going even further the team modeled specific SCAD buildings so that students could manipulate them in a VR environment.
As the project began, I petitioned the professor to allow us to us Agile/SCRUM for our work management. This lead to me taking on the role of SCRUM lead and producer. Helping to keep our Sprints organized and updated as well as maintain the organization of files on our collaborative drive.
I lead the Leap Motion team as we attempted to integrate LeapMotion hand controls. We took 4 weeks to attempt to find a way to use the emerging technology, getting as far as interacting with our main menu system and rotating objects. Unfortunately while it did work some what, it did not operate at a level that was conducive to a good user experience. And ultimately this lead to my recommending that we drop the LeapMotion and pivot to a menu system that you interacted with using Oculus controllers.
While designing the appearance and layout of the menu, I decided that readability and a minimalist design was needed so that those who have never used VR before would intuitively know how to work the menu. I used inspiration from movies and TV shows that show VR or AR interfaces as a starting point and developed the UI that was later implemented.
Towards the end of the project it seemed that there was something lacking from our 3D models and the 360 videos, and that was some sort of audio. So initially using only my iPhone, I recorded several examples and presented them to the class. Once dropping it into the scene, it became clear to everyone that the added audio added another level of depth to the experience. As a result the teacher put together a small group of us to revamp the material I already had and to create additional recordings. Myself and 2 other students used a recording booth to create a quality recording that better fit the quality of the project. Developing a recording for 90% of the SCAD Buildings that we induced in the VR experience.
