My group and I are a part of the VirtuCare team. We are creating an entire immersive virtual environment on the game engine Unity. We are also using many languages and libraries to integrate interactions into the environment. It has been such a journey to explore and use new framework, new tools, and new everything. None of us has any experience with Unity and C# so we all had to rely on each other to accomplish our project goals so far. In this blog, I will be talking more in-depth about the technologies and my honest opinion of them.
Right off the bat, I can confidently say that my favorite and least favorite technology is Unity. Let me explain, Unity to me is a double edged sword. It can provide a very powerful game engine to create so many creative, wonderful, and immersive games and virtual realities. However, it can be the most confusing, difficult, and complicated technology to ever deal with. I had the most difficulty learning Unity as it is not famous thus not many tutorials and articles about it can be found online. Furthermore, It can contain many documents that are outdated and generally not helpful. Finding and understanding the workflow and different tools of Unity can be very exhausting and time consuming. It took so much and practice to even get the basic idea behind it. I will be completely honest, I still don’t fully appreciate it but I am appreciating it more and more by the day.
The technology that had the most difficult learning curve was actually Unity as I said before, there aren’t many tutorials on it and it contains many outdated docs. However, the most easy learning curve was actually C#. I was able to learn it fairly quickly due to the fact that C# looks and uses the same syntax as C. I was fortunate enough to have taken Operating Systems beforehand, which actually gave me enough experience in C that allowed me to quickly pick up C#.
If I can start all over, I probably would still pick the same technologies as right now, as they are considered the industry standard. They also offer a wide range of tools that my team can utilize to build the immersive virtual reality. If I can wish for another technology to be added to VirtuCare, I probably would pick “Blender” to be a part of the technologies. I heard many things about “Blender” and I really wanted to try it.
I also completely forgot to share about my last favorite piece of technology. It is the assets, or prefabs that allow the reuse of the same object or prefab in Unity. Assets are essentially libraries in Unity that allows specific functions that can be reused. The assets can have prefabs that can be utilized into the environment. The prefabs can have custom configuration with the ability to configure them further if desired. The prefabs can be reused as many times as needed. Our team recently bought an amazing and realistic asset specifically designed for our desired environment. I personally think it is the best purchase ever as it gave the team the right and correct equipment to start building the immersive virtual environment.
Overall, I am very happy with the progress that me and my group have shown. I am very glad that we were all very happy to help each other so we can learn those new technologies together. The experience has taught me so much and I truly appreciateed learning more about the technologies needed for this project.
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