Personal reflections - Justyna Janczy (309958)

 

To start with my general reflections I would sum up the XRD course as the challenging one, without prior knowledge from GMD. Reflecting the first weeks of the course, it was very frustrating to begin with. Not having any clue how Unity works and having to “immediately” create some working and representative project. Adding to that abstraction level of Virtual Reality.

However after spending quite some time on getting to know Unity and understanding the fundamental concepts during the first project it started combine all together. Though I was surprised how much effort is required to do even a simple button and coordinate it with scripts. Not to forget the countless number of objects to be used that I didn’t have a clue about. And that was actually what I spent the time on during the first project.

The second project already didn’t seem that abstract and difficult. My group decided to make the bowling game with ARCore tool which surprised me with how easy it was to set it up and start working with. As well as the possibilities it gives that one can do just from the phone! Though I wouldn’t mind a bit more documentation and tutorials about the tool itself.  

After first 2 projects it became slightly harder to work together as it required us to meet from time to time at university to firstly set up the headset and later test our projects. However I feel like the Virtual Reality was giving the most possibilities and was the easiest to come up with some fun project. Our group decided to make Goalkeeper minigame with XRInteraction Toolkit.

On the last project we chose to do few arcade games in XR. We actually were having problems when we were brainstorming about the ideas to come up with the one that won’t be VR or AR. However it was nice learning process not to mistake them in the future. I’m very happy from this project . I believe also because of the knowledge that all of us already had it was it was relatively easier to work with.

To sum up the overall experience of the XRD course I think it was very valuable one, not only because of the knowledge that we could gain but also because of the structure. It was something different for me to have such project oriented course where it was up to us to search for the solutions, just a bit narrowed by the skeleton that the course was giving. I learned from that a lot, not only not too waste to much time if something is not working and looking for workaround immediately but also about the team work and communication. As well as about my personal preferences on how to gain knowledge on my own about some new technologies like VR.
I highly appreciated the elasticity of the course which actually allowed my group to work from not only different cities but even countries. Despite that I felt like we were working very efficiently by simply trying to divide project into independent chunks so that we could work simultaneously.

I only feel like a little bit unsatisfied that I couldn’t spend as much time as I would like on the learning process to get the basics. Maybe having small introduction at the beginning of the course for the people who didn’t take the GMD course would be helpful to start smoother..?