Month: January 2022

Categories
Personal Interest

The future of VR

After Facebook changed its company name to Meta, Zuckerberg stated “To reflect who we are and the future we hope to build, I’m proud to share that our company is now Meta.” (Meta is a social platform based on metaverse which is 3d virtual world. Since then, VR technology is getting attention more than before.

As a person who is dreaming of becoming a game programmer, this is one of the interesting topics. So, I would like to talk about the current development stage of VR and the future of VR.

VR is a short-term of Virtual Reality. Based on my google search, surprisingly, the first vr machine was released in early-mid 1990, and it commercialized around the 2010s. The most popular machines are Oculus (Rift), HTC (Vive). The first-generation commercial product was okay but there were some drawbacks such as the weight and lack of power of cpu, memory as well as contents. So, it didn’t get popular as much as people expected. But, in late 2017, sony released Playstation with VR machine and game, and it was very successful (The next generation of Sony VR is coming out this year). Now I can say VR ear has come. Because VR machine gets lighter, and it has affordable price and variety of contents.

As you can see from the video, the quality of the graphics and render are fantastic. Powerful graphic cards, memory, and engines make this possible. And, it shows the current status of VR industry.

d VR is getting spread to many fields as well. One good example is the medical industry. They are using VR for medical training.

Lucid Reality Labs | VR education, training and upskilling

Now we can’t separate VR technology from our lives, it will be getting into our life. This is why many people say VR is the future of human society. Then what we can expect from the future VR?

One thing I can expect is that we might live in a borderless world not limited to physical land, we might live in the real world and virtual world at the same time, interchangeably. And, it is happening right now. Now the young generation has another themselves in a virtual world. I can take ZEPETO as an example which is a social platform based on metaverse. They have 2 billion users and they spend money to decorate their avatar and socialize with their friends.

As the thing is getting changed quickly, we might face a fully digitized world shortly and might play a game like full-dive virtual reality game like anime called sword art online. I would like to be a port of the stream as a programmer. 🙂

Categories
Capstone Project Tech Knowledge

Software mockup tools

As our first task, I and other teammates created a web-application mockup that shows the general workflow and design. Wireframes are often considered an important task of the software development process since it provides a visual understanding and workflow. So, many developers never overlook the task and get help from mock-up tools such as Balsamiq and Figma.
Today, I would like to talk about the three most popular prototype mockup tools which are Balsamiq, NinjaMock, and Figma. I prefer Figma and you will find the reason later in this post.

  1. Balsmiq

I came to know the tool when I took CS361 class at Oregon State University because one of the tasks was creating a wireframe for a project. This tool was pretty powerful even it was free. You can create elements as much you want from various options(I believe there were limits for the free version, but I couldn’t find any disadvantages from the free version). And, you were able to link an element with a page so that you can create interaction between two or more elements. But, this time, we didn’t use Balsamiq this time. The reason because it is not free anymore, it gives you 30 days trial, but after the free trial, you can’t go back work on your work unless you sign up.

2. Figma

I often use Figma for personal projects. You can create prototypes for different platforms (Web, Phone, etc). You can also use it for free, but you can create only three projects with your free account. However, if you delete one of your works, then you can create another project. It means you can use the tool for free forever if you keep the number of projects.

or you can import preset from a library). However, once you are getting used to using Figma, it can be the most powerful tool to build your prototype. and even it looks so real. On the other hand, the other two tools provide a limited number of elements design and given elements looks cartoon-ish.

3. NinjaMock

I didn’t know about this mockup tool until this class. We were planning to work on Balsamiq, but we noticed Balsamiq is not free anymore so that we were looking for other tools including Figma. Our team didn’t want to spend extra time to learn figma, and didn’t want to spend money on Balsamiq. So, we came to this free version of NinjaMock. After created mock with this tool, I do not recommend to use NinjaMock unless your project is personal and small. Here are the couple of reasons. First, free version gives you very limited element capacity which is 200. It takes average of 25 elements to have a simple web page (it took 15 elements for the image below), it means you can make about 8 pages which is very small.

For free users, Figma is the best option since it has limit of projects you can create, but other sources are free. This is why I prefer Figma. Lastly, the contents above are very personal, you can find other tools better than I thought. And, every project has a different purpose so you can choose any tool that has the best fit for your project.

Categories
Capstone Project

Project Start-off

I had a 1-hour meeting with my team for the CS467 class. In this meeting, we had discussed the TEAM STANDARD which is about the team’s working rules and expectations has the goal of increasing team performance. Today, I would like to share some of our standards here.

1. Team Name

We have decided our team name as QuizBanana because one of the project requirements said that our application should be able to replace Survey Monkey. So one of our team members suggested this name.

2. Communication

Communication is very important when we are working as a team. There are many communication tools such as Discord, Slack, and Google hangout. Team QuizBanana agrees on using MS Teams because MS Teams is the official tool for the CS467 class.

3. Project Management Tool

Since it is a project class, we will work on project programming from scratch for the entire term. So, we have to take care of time. In order to manage this project, we are going to use the Jira. At first, we planned to use Asana, but Jira is one of the popular tools in the industry and it is free. So we change to Jira

4. Code Management

As everyone can expect, we are going to use Github for code management. It is free and powerful.

5. Conflict Management

I personally believe conflict management is really important especially working as a team. So, our team came up with two ways of handling this situation.

If the conflict is a team matter, be aware of any conflict that occurs with assignments or other group members. Takes steps to decide on how serious the conflict is and how it would affect other members of the team. If the conflict is an individual matter, please speak with the team member directly on the issue and allow discussion from both individuals

I am already excited about this project. All members respect each other and I can see we are trying hard to make things right. 

Categories
Personal Interest

My First Post

This is the first blog post for the OSU Capstone Project. In this post, I would like to talk about my interest and what I like to do after graduation since this term is the last term at OSU.

It has been 3 years since I started the online OSU computer science program. Most of programming classes have a programming project and most of projects are related to simple game.

Here are some of the game projects I have done for OSU courses

-CS162 : Escape Room

-CS325 : Tetris

Those projects were good enough for me to have an interest in a game development. Since then, I took some of my time to study the game development during free time. Thanks to the YouTube, I was able to access to many free online lecture. In order to develop a game, I had to study c# and unity.

Unity is a game engine that allows you run your 2D/3D objects on screen, and C# is the main language for the engine. Now OSU provides most of all programming class with python, but I took those courses with C/C++. So It was relatively easy to learn C# since the syntax of C# is pretty similar to C/C++.

However, I never used the Unity before, so it took some time to understand how to use Unity and its library. The most difficult part of working on unity was to understand it is a frame based program which means your code is looping itself by Unity. Therefore, if you are using for/while loop in Unity you have high chance to have infinity loop error. While I was trying to be a friend with Unity, I had a chance to work on actual game development with people who I met at Networking Event.

This is the first video game I made (this is just sample version). I am getting myself into the game development, and I am actually enjoying the game programming. There are some things that I need to study to be a game programmer. So, I might do more side projects and targeting top game companies for my future career. 🙂