Progress Report 1

02/13/18 - 03/06/18: aims for first block

  • 02/13/18 [projected]: select and read 6-7 articles for comparative analysis of VR in a particular field (e.g. VR in academia), distilling points [4 hrs]; updating notes page [1 hr];

  • 02/15/18 [projected]: select and read 6-7 articles for comparative analysis of VR in a particular field (e.g. VR in education), distilling points [4 hrs]; updating notes page [1 hr];

  • 02/22/18 [projected]: select and read 6-7 articles for comparative analysis of VR in a particular field (e.g. VR in engineering), distilling points [4 hrs]; updating notes page [1 hr];

  • 02/27/18 [projected]: select and read 6-7 articles for comparative analysis of VR in a particular field (e.g. VR and human interaction), distilling points [4 hrs]; updating notes page [1 hr];

  • 03/01/18 [projected]: select and read 6-7 articles for comparative analysis of VR in a particular field (e.g. VR in medicine), distilling points [4 hrs]; updating notes page [1 hr];

  • 03/06/18 [projected]: select and read 6-7 articles for comparative analysis of VR in a particular field (e.g. VR in the public sector), distilling points [4 hrs]; updating notes page [1 hr];

02/13/18 - 03/06/18: TODO

1.

My course deliverable will be a contribution to a boiled down narrative, outlining the history of VR and its wider applications. I will distill this from the articles and literature that I have assembled and read so far, and the notes that I have taken on these articles. So far I have spent some seven to eight hours on this particular objective; other time was spent on playing around with different VR technologies and getting a sense of what they can do particularly.

A second deliverable - though I'm not sure we should have more than one? - could be a comparison between a "Hello World" in Blender and Unity. I would model and create "Hello World" in block letters in both these packages and record time commitment as well as outline the steps necessary that could form a tutorial; this could be a third deliverable. So far I have spent some three hours on playing around with Blender and installing Unity.

2.

I have been mostly working under the 'Literature' heading; looking up literature, organizing and putting them in the right place, as well as skimming through to get the main points. The intention is to get further down into these articles to boil them down to their most essential arguments, but also to investigate the following questions:

Who has done AR/VR, what have they tried, under what circumstances and conditions, and on a longer trajectory, why do AR/VR? What has it added/taken away from experiencing the real and digital worlds?

The aim of these questions is to make these articles, spanning such a diverse range of fields, somewhat comparable and useful to outline a general history of AR/VR.

For my second deliverable, I could put the data from my comparison under the 'Comparisons' - 'VR Development Software' heading.

3.

My multi-week plan is added under my Activity Log.

4.

5.

02/13/18 - 03/06/18: update Report

Course deliverables

  • Abstracts of 24 - 28 articles from various fields using VR; extracting main points in attempts of cross-field comparison to answer questions on who used VR to what purposes and how has it been successful or not; these are currenty listed under notes in my journal page. These notes will provide a comparative angle and help us contextualize our findings of recent VR applications in a much broader time scale; they could function as part of the introduction

  • Tutorials in Blender of 'Hello World'; these are currently listed under 'Home' > 'Tutorials' > 'Blender'. These tutorials are part of a tutorial series in Blender to compare similar tasks in Unity. The aim is to extract metrics based on the sheet we are developing in class for a comparative evaluation of these two software packages.

Activities & relationships

  • Critical reading, distilling main points, summarizing of literature; updating and organizing notes; updating notes pages on the Wiki;

  • Exploring techniques of modeling in Blender; looking up existing tutorials; installing Steam and BlenderVR;

Total time spent since last report

~31 hours

Activities not geared towards deliverable

  • Exploration of MinVR for future projects; I would like to be able to understand MinVR better as that will enable me to better understand coding of models (rather than Blender's point-and-click GUI)

Evaluation

  • Total time is appropriate: 4

  • Past activities are explicitly and clearly related to deliverables: 3

  • Deliverables are described in wiki under 'home' or 'manuscript': 4

  • Future activities are appropriately sized: ?

  • Milestones are clear and evaluatable: ?

  • Future activities are explicitly and clearly related to deliverables: ?

  • Deliverables are clearly targeted at places in the wiki: 4