Hello once again from team mixAR!

Last week was quarters, and we learned a lot from that.  Naturally, after receiving not only feedback from our own ETC staff, which we are still parsing through in some cases, but also industry professional kind enough to stop by from EA, we had a lot to do. We have begun to focus heavily on getting our character into the experience ASAP.  This means really defining what their personality is, how they’ll move, act, and respond to the guest, as well as how they are engineered to exist in the scene.  Another big point of feedback we got was on our UI, which we have made smaller to fit the field of view on the Hololens, as well as making it generally more responsive and helpful to a guest.

As to the agent’s personality, we have mapped out each personality we feel would be strong, and created graphics for each one demonstrating how the agent would tend to act with that personality.  This was a combined effort, and we are now refining those personalities even further in order to rank those personalities, so we can direct our focus on which to spend more time on.  Soon we will be able to get animations assigned to different actions and moments, as we are very happy to report we have just finished rigging the fully  modeled and textured character!  This is a big milestone for us artistically, so hurray for that!

Engineering wise, we discovered a few bugs during quarters, and they proved more pesky than we had hoped, and most of the week was devoted to that.  For those who are interested, the problem seems to be that the Hololens does some special optimizations that cause an error the device, but not on the PC.  At the same time though, we are laying the groundwork code for getting the agent in the scene, including code for the agent following the user’s gaze, managing where it is in the field of view of the guest, and generally being in helpful locations.  

That’s really all there is to say for this week.  Next week, we should have a character in the experience interacting with guests.  Our first playtest should be before halfs.  

Here’s to weeks gone, and weeks yet to come, or something.

~mixAR