This week, Phantasm dove headfirst into creating interaction demos in Unity with various interfaces. Our programmer Sarvesh explored the Myo armband, making a pick up and point-to-travel mechanic. Another programmer, Jason, looked into the Google Tango tablet, creating a prototype that uses the tablet to track guest position in addition to the head tracking of the Oculus. Our last programmer, Allyn, initially explored the LeapMotion. But when that proved too limiting, he moved to the Razer Hydra controllers and made a prototype for joystick movement and hand manipulation.
On the art end, our 3D artist Tina was able to find some free rigged models online and use them to animate some of the movements we aim to include in the experience, seeing how they look and feel in virtual reality. Together, the team was able to come to a couple of main mechanics we wanted to include: searching and picking up, as well as travelling by rail hooks. With these, the beginning of our story direction could be settled.
On Wednesday, the team was able to sit down and call Matt Kinsella about our progress as well as ask more clarification questions about any constraints on the project. He emphasized that Legendary’s desires and expectations for the project are much more rooted in innovation and integrating interaction meaningfully into storytelling, and that technological accessibility and closely sticking to source material are less important. Phantasm now has weekly scheduled calls with Matt on Wednesdays 6 PM EST.
Lastly, our UI/UX artist Jun has been working on Phantasm’s branding art. While our poster and half sheet are still in progress, our logo is somewhat simplified and complete, and is shown below.
Next week:
Phantasm’s branding art will be completed next week, with an art critique with other ETC project teams on Monday. We will also move into bringing the programmers into one common code base, focusing on integrating the desired mechanics and technology together to begin coding the beginnings of our final project in Unreal Engine 4. We are also looking to flesh out our story components and find some higher resolution rigged models to continue animating for our final project. Finally, Phantasm will begin preparations for our quarters walkarounds at the beginning of week 5, where ETC faculty will get the opportunity to see all the student projects in progress.