This week, we started working remotely! Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, CMU has made a work from home policy and the ETC set us up with our desktops and VR devices so we had the equipment we needed for our project. The bulk of the week went into setting up and testing our systems at our homes and coming up with strategies and plans to mitigate the effects of not being able to physically work with each other for the rest of the semester.
Our arrangement has changed a bit due to this. Now Varun will be providing the motion data for his own system while Angela’s going to be operating the virtual camera system independently through her headset. To test our workflow, we’ve decided on a gold spike of sorts. We’re going to be recreating a shot from Shawshank Redemption, in a manner similar to our process for Moonrise Kingdom.
While Angela and Shera worked with Kevin on the design and UX of the virtual camera system, Arnav made a rough layout for the scene and Varun ran tests on his motion capture system to make sure he could configure it in a way that he could run it independently.
On Friday, the team got the opportunity to talk to 2 people from Disney Technology Innovation Group – Mark Mine and Evan Goldberg. We got some valuable feedback on our systems, workflow and overall project which we’ve documented and also got some recommendations on software or projects we could look at that might help us. While we did get some of our technical questions answered, they also gave us pointers on the overall story process and ways we could design our project so that our work aligns with industry expectations.