My name is Dov. I am a student at Oregon State University and I live in Canada. My degree focuses on Cybersecurity, but I also a big VR/XR enthusiast. This is a blog I created to document my experiences with the first Computer Science capstone course, CS491.
My team and I have finally completed our design documentation. This means we’re ready to begin actual project. It’s funny how everything seems so obvious until it needs to be explained on paper. It turns out I overestimated my share of the project; being the Scene Creator, I thought I was responsible for creating all the scene templates and inserting all the objects and assets before the simulation begins. But, as it turns out, all of that is controlled by the end user. And, all I have to do is make sure the camera and lighting are orientated and set correctly and the terrain object spawns on the simulation start up.
This is quite a contrast from my expectations in Post 2. Of course, I don’t expect my role to be simple, but at least I don’t have to worry about ensuring that each building has an entrance for trucks to drive into. Or at least, I don’t have to worry about it until next semester.
We’re now 7 weeks into the semester. My group and I now know each tother. We have written many documents together, we brainstorm together and we meet with the project sponsor weekly. Team roles were assigned a few weeks ago; I am the Scene Creator.
As the Scene Creator, it’s my job to creates template scenes for the rest of the roles to use. We are using the Unity game engine, which I have been playing around with for a few weeks. I now understand why game development is considered a difficult discipline; it combines everything I have learnt in University. This includes multiple types of math, data structures, code organization, code efficiency, and more math.
But as the scene creator, it seems that a large part of my job is done within the Unity UI, and there is a lot of documentation on everything I’m supposed to do. I have to create the terrains, create the lighting, place objects into the scene such as houses and roads, and I have to do all this while considering that my teammates need to operate within the scene that I’m creating, so I need to make sure that I incorporate things like designated paths for vehicles to drive on, and I have to make sure building have entrances for the truck to drive into and I have to include places for the trucks to stop and unload. This will require a lot of planning and testing.
This is interesting work though so I’m excited to really get into it. Tune into my next blog post when I’ll probably have started actual scene development.
I have worked on many projects at Oregon State. But, most of them taught a specific topic, such as Agile basics, or database/website integration. However, this is the first course I am taking that encourages us to choose from a wide selection of project categories. There are Cryptography projects, and AI based projects, and language processing projects. And out of them, the project I chose as number 1 to work on for the rest of the semester is get the VR/XR project.
This is because I would really like to learn how to use a game engine like Unreal or Unity well enough so that I can write software for XR. Although the project does not focus on my preferred area of XR, which is locomotion, I’m sure it will provide a very good look into the workflow of an XR developer.
Tune in next week for the next edition of DovsBlog.