Heritage VR

Week 2

Group Roles
This week ted and I got together and discussed our roles for this semester. Due to the fact that we no longer had a group of 4 for the project and the amount of work that we had to do was even bigger then before (we now have a new program to learn, this being Quest 3D), we decided to split the roles as such. I would continue mainly consult with the client on a fortnightly basis, although ted would often come along as well. I would also continue working on additional modeling and detailing existing models & doing all the texturing. As well as this I shall be conducting further historical research and documenting our work as we go along.
Ted's role was to deal with the more technical side of things, such as learning Quest 3D and then importing the models into this realtime engine as well as doing any of the required scripting. As well as this he is also continuing to work on our website, which will be hopefully be soon hosted by the UQ Archaelogical Sevices Unit. Finally He is also conducting further research into the capabilities of Quest 3D and possible final output methods e.g. VR Cave etc. (see below)

New Ideas
As mentioned last semester, this semesters plan is to take a 3D reconstruction of the 1890's Mining Town of Paradise from central QLD and make an interactive walkthrough and virtual tour of the township as it was in 1890 using the Quest 3D realtime Engine.
This week we also came up with an idea that we could make the project more interactive and educational for the users by using poser figures as information points to give the user information about certain buildings and areas within the paradise township. The reason that we decided to use poser figures as the information points instead of just, for example, sign posts, is that studys have shown that users migrate towards human figures within a virtual environment and will generally try to interact with them. We decided that when a user clicked on a figure, that a screen would come up displaying information relating to the surrounding structures and area.
We had previously looked at having figures within the township, but never thought of using them in this way.

posted by Tim Davidson @ 4:08 pm