It was the Fourth of July
First long weekend at the internship! And last one too. :( Oh well. Anyway, I felt this week was very productive. We finally starting working on the demo of our project. As mentioned in the previous blog, me and Marvis had been working on testing out different effects in Unity. Marvis was given an Asset that generates a beautiful terrain of grass, flowers and trees, meanwhile I had made a setting of a living room with many lamps to work on manipulating their intensity.
When we presented our work to Dr. McCann and Andrew, Dr. McCann got the idea to do our demo in two different environments, one that was indoors and another one that was outdoor. That way, we could try comparing to which environment do people that try our demo seem to show more empathy to. This would also help us have a more scientific hypothesis, where we have two comparing elements in our project and assume which one people will feel more empathic about. We also have to see if our Empathy Tool actually produces some type of sympathy to people that don't suffer from seizures. We're in a very experimental phase in our project right now.
Dr.Brian also said that for more comparing measurements, we should have a more tame demo, with effects that are related to more casual post symptoms of the seizure, such as a blurry vision, bright lights or type of ringing in your ears. Then, we can have another scarier demo, which is more related to psychosis, which might include hallucinations, unknown voices whispering, among others.
Meanwhile, Marvis is going to be working on the outside environment since she already has an asset that generates a very realistic landscape of trees, bumpy roads, grass and flowers. I'm going to be working in the indoor environment, which essentially is going to be a house located in Marvis' setting.
I started looking for an outdoor 3d model that was nice looking, free and whose structure looked like it could belong in a forest. I was able to find a house with wood material and that already had all the furniture objects inside the house. It's very realistic looking and I think it works very well by what we're trying to do. It took me a while to be able to transfer it to Unity since the model was in .3ds format (3d Max), but after converting it, I started working on putting colliders around the walls and columns so the user can't just go through them. This also took me a while because the house is very detailed and Unity doesn't have an automated feature that knows where to put colliders on the right places.
