1. Project by Simone Amico, Matteo Foglio and Andrea Milanta
In this project, I liked the design and the interaction with stuffs in the virtual room. The first thing you would notice when walking in into this office is the wall size fish tank. You would notice the animation of jellyfish that makes it look realistic. It gives the office a unique stylish design. I would use the same animation for potential underwater virtual projects. It might be also extended with different degrees of velocity and speed to mimic the movement of large species and creatures that live in the sea. Another feature that I liked is the control over lighting and sound. The touch buttons on the wall can be used to change the music into another song with changing in lighting associated with some songs. Inspired by this feature, I would implement a theme control to change the sound, light, and background of virtual rooms or buildings. In this project, the room can be turned into a club style room to host a party without changing the place and with the feeling of a party atmosphere. Although the sound plays all over the room, they kept the chamber sound-isolated, in which the specific style or theme can applied to specific zones.
The other things that I liked are the interactions with the coca cola machine, computers, basketball and the cups. A good physics are implanted in these items. The coca cola machine function when touching the big button and it drops a bottle of drink accordingly. Here, I expect a use of the physics in a different way. Rather than applying a physics to a rigid body like a bottle holder inside the machine, disabling the physics from the bottle holder is applied in this case so the bottle can be dropped. That inspires us to use the same technique in different applications. Out of curiosity, I kept touching the big button to see if the machine has some capacity of drink bottles. However, it drops a bottle of drink forever, which is not correct in the real world. If this would be used in a future project, a capacity can be given to the machine by limiting the response to a specific number of touches, which represent the number of bottles it contains.
In addition, I liked the interaction of turning the computers on and off especially the responsive screen and sound. Here, the interaction is with the computer case but the response is from another item which is the screen. In this aspect, I would use a good physics networking in future project, which will increase the interactivity in the virtual world. Another physics that works as real is the stacking of a punch of cups. The stacking reacts to the shape of cups in which the cups are stacked up to some level of the cup edges. I think in this case a mesh collider of the cup shape is used so it collides precisely. Although mesh collider are preferable to avoid, using convex mesh will reduce complexity to some extend while preserving good collision. There is also some objects like the basketball that has some nice physics. The ball is not only can be grabbed and thrown but it starts bouncing when have thrown on the floor. That is, to increase interactivity in potential virtual reality projects, different physics should be combined on physical items.
2. Project by Aldo Alvarez
The second project I’m going to give a reflection on is Aldo’s project. It has some features that I found to be interesting. Many students showed a variety of colorful designs. This project was also full of colors that give modernity and stylishness to the virtual office. The first thing that I liked is the layout of the office. Dividing the room into five main areas helped to make best utilization of the office space. By dividing into five main areas, it was possible to add a personal office within private personal area that can be used by a chair or a manager of the office. There are also two areas that have working desks to be used by workers. One of them was a bit formal with desks, computers and chairs, however, the second one was more casual in which you can just grab your laptop and sit on to work or maybe to talk with others. In addition to that, there is also a separate formal meeting room. I liked that it’s separated from all other areas for more privacy and quietness during formal meetings.
I also found its interesting to have some entertaining stuffs around the office. The most entertaining item that I liked was the small cubes that function the piano keyboard. I found it’s so creative to build that in a virtual office. They were functioning very similarly to piano keyboard with some musical tones that you can play using one hand or two hands. Since we are building a virtual world, that inspires us to mimic things from the real world. It wouldn’t be necessary to build things that exist in the real world. You can be more creative and add more items that you dream to make in real life.
Also, the tennis table was interesting to play with. Not because you can virtually grab a paddle and hit a ball; but because of the physics of the ball that makes it bouncing which gives you a feeling of real balls. All other tennis balls have physics and they functioned correctly when they have thrown on the floor. A more challenging one to deal with the physics on the virtual world is the jenga game. It’s interesting to try grabbing a piece from the jenga and not to make other pieces to fall. As in the real world, if you did that carefully you can grab apiece correctly without making other pieces to fall. I liked the level of challenging that is added here.
Last thing I liked was the control over lighting. You can turn the light on and off and more interestingly you can change the light intensity in the meeting room. That would make me play with different lighting features like intensity, range and color on future projects and not to add lighting with static features. In this project there is also a good use of sounds. Many items have a sound effect when you interact with like lighting switches, toys around the room, bouncing balls and stereo player. It’s advantageous when creating a virtual world to add physics and triggered sound to rigid bodies. That would increase the reality of your virtual world.