These weeks were very productive in an administrative sense. We met our clients this week! Their names are Ali Momeni and Aparna Wilder. Ben Scott, who we will also be working closely with, is an independent study student who so far has been solely responsible for the Unity programming of the SocialVR project. He will be an excellent source for Michael, our lead programmer. These first few weeks were mostly spent getting our Socialight team up to speed on the progress of SocialVR and other projects like it.
SocialVR is an app with 3 parts. A mobile app, a web editor, and a database/cloud/user management system. Using a Github repository for version control, and Slack for communication, our SocialVR development will revolve around 4 general criteria provided to us by the clients.
Social feature development testing
- Co-Presence
- Visualizing gaze
- Visualizing body / gestures
- Tele-presence
- Live video streaming from YouTube, FaceBook, Periscope
- 1-way video chat?
- 2-way video chat?
- Text-AI interfaces?
- Sonic navigation and storytelling
- Live / interactive sound/prompts?
- Collaborative Maker Interfaces
- Minecraft like?
- Google Docs like?
- Prezi like?
To ensure we understand the needs of addressing the above features for the mobile app, team Socialight spent this week researching the pros and cons of other technologies, the lists to be delivered on Monday with our second meeting with our client.
Additionally, we have worked amongst ourselves to work out our weekly meeting times, core hours, and key daily/weekly tasks. We have also begun work on a proposed semester long schedule, which we are set to show our client on Monday. Beyond that, we plan next week to begin research standards of VR and 360 video to get up to speed with our client’s expectations.
Branding for our project team is beginning to be a focus for our team. This weekend, we plan to each of us find reference pictures for potential poster, photo, and theming ideas. We’ve agreed we’d like to try to get desk lamps for our desks for theming the room, since we want to go for a light theme, but we’re still not sure yet which direction to go in. We suspect this will be easier once we have a poster and team photo idea.