Hello, again! This week’s update will be far from prosaic.
(1) First, let’s talk about my object interaction.
My intention was to have an intuitive way to control the water shader’s properties, which then turned to an attempt to control said properties via the touchpad. Nevertheless, I have settled on another method for the sake of saving time. I found a tutorial for setting up a radial menu that activates once one touches the touchpad. With said menu, one will be able to change the material of the water shader. As it stands now, the user can choose from two different dot sizes and two different levels of dot density.
(2) Secondly, transport.
For some reason the STEAM VR teleport prefab was not working on my project. I even tried it on new scenes in the same project and on a new project altogether. I had to script my own teleportation following another tutorial. This one features a sphere which I parented to the left controller. I prefer this to the prefab since I can control the material of the sphere and I avoid the more grid-like interaction that could clash with the atmosphere of my meditation world. Nevertheless, right now, the teleportation works once and then the sphere appears at the same level of the user, coming forth and back. The press of the touchpad still ushers the user forward, but there is less control and, of course, vision is compromised. I will fix this in the coming weeks.
(3) Finally, gaze interaction.
I had mentioned that I wanted to include a floating feature. I will slowly work up to this, but for now I am striving for the gaze to trigger the whale animations.

I finally began my breath belt!
This week Elle Castle and I started working on the belt I sourced. We cut the belt and punched a hole in one of the ends. I sewed conductive rubber to the other side. Next, we will sew in some conductive wire and connect it to an Arduino board. Can’t wait to connect the device to Unity!

Now let’s talk about my AR app. As a requisite for the course, I had to model my own arm. I completed it this past week, and am now ready to rig and animate it. Then, the building of the app should be fairly straightforward.

Some new limitations for the prototype:
(a) it will be for unilateral forearm amputees
(b) the user’s position will be limited to placing the elbow area on a surface
(c) I will create a simple rig, perhaps of wire, which will have the marker and serve as a prosthetic forearm
(d) I will also consider the potential uses for stroke patients, who also struggle with coordinating their hand and forearm movements

This is all for this week. A hearty thanks to all those reading and sending messages!