Week Two (01/27/2012)

An exciting week two for Team VT brought new outside additions to the project group. Joining the charge will be two of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Architecture students John Kim, Richman Nuemann and Dan Rapoport to assist in developing the architectural models and interior design documents for the virtual tour. Acting as liaisons from the previous chapter of the High Point Pittsburgh project John and Richman will help finalize the immense design documents of both interior and exterior spaces, document the building’s many green technology features and ensure the realism we hope to deliver in our final product.

Our two programmers on the team, Cintia Higashi and Siddhesh Vichare have been working hard this week to begin building our social media inputs. Cintia completed our Twitter app allowing guests to sign in as well as tweet to @highpointpittsburgh that will be implemented as a virtual guest book. Aside from the Twitter app functioning from within the Unity 3D game engine, Cintia launched our team’s website at ww.etc.cmu.edu/projects/highpoint. From this site followers of the project will be able to view our progress, meet the team members and read our daily and weekly newsletters about the current work being completed.

Siddhesh furthered his research in creating our unique Facebook app that will allow guests to register prior to the tour and receive personalized interactive material. Over the weekend he will be finalizing the prototyping stage by connecting the Facebook app with a Unity GUI that will allow us to display information as necessary. After speaking with Paul Heckbert, a software engineer at Gigapan and member of the CMU CREATE lab, we gathered more information to help us with the implementation of the large Gigapan files.

Focusing on a specific request of the client’s Sun-moon imported a 360-degree panorama taken from the top of the Steel Tower building into Unity. When this image is combined with the 3D model of the building it demonstrates the potential of an extraordinary view. Much work will continue throughout the following week to clean up the image and remove any distortion to ensure a life like feel on the tour.

The team will meet with Richmann, John and Dan on Tuesday to discuss their designs of the interior and plans to finalize the main 3D model. We are excited to begin moving ahead in this project and compiling our individual tech components into a single experience.