Virtual Reality Tour of Met

By jhclaura in Blog, Job, Spring 2014 0 Comment

For my internship during Spring semester 2014 in Media Lab of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, I hooked up

    1. 3D models of Met from the Architecture Department
    2. Official Audio Guide
    3. 3D models art pieces in Greek and Roman gallery, made by 3D scan with photos
    4. Unity as game engine
    5. virtual reality head-mounted display Oculus Rift as controller

and create an immersive virtual reality tour of Met!

forBlog With Oculus Rift, users can wonder around the museum, listening to the audio guide and admiring art pieces, walk upstair, watch butterflies, being blocked by huge bowl, and being inside of the surreal mash-up models(credits to Decho<horse> and Rui<uncolor triangulars>). metTour

IDEA

With a background as VFX artist of 3D animation and post production, I’m always interested in 3D and how it can be interactive in the creative way. Once I got the chance to intern in Media Lab of the Met and knew we can access the 3D models of museum, I wanted to use Oculus Rift to walk inside the fantasy version of the Met, and to enjoy the immersive experience in space.

 

PROJECT_DEVELOPMENT

Virtual Met Museum –> Fantasy Experiment –> Art piece + Audio Guide

 

BASIC_SETUP_HOW_TO

First of all, tons of basic knowledge about Unity here. And setup a project from scratch, here.

 

✓ Import BIM 3D models into Unity

Basically just put the fbx file into the Assets folder of the project you just created. Not too complicated but there’s one thing you should be aware of, the SCALE. It’s a good practice to setup scale right in the modeling application before importing the model to Unity, and associated details described as below:

  • 1 Unity unit = 1m
  • the fewer GameObjects the better. Also, use 1 material if you can
  • useful link: wiki unity3d

 

✓ Oculus Rift Plugin in Unity 3d Setup

Just follow the clear instruction on youtube!

 

✓ Add collider to meshes

In order to preventing player walking through meshes(e.g. walls, stairs), we need to add Collider attribute on models, steps as below:

  • select model
  • @inspector
  • Add Component –> Physics –> Box Collider or Mesh Collider
  • Mesh Collider is more specific than box collider but at the same time is more expensive to use.

collider copy

 

✓ Occlusion Culling

Means that things you aren’t looking at, aren’t loading into memory, so game will run faster.

  •  geometry must be broken into sensibly sized pieces.
    • if you have one object that contains all the furniture, either all or none of the entire set of furniture will be culled.
  • tag all scene objects that you want to be part of the occlusion to Occluder Static in the Inspector.
  • Back!
  • useful link: unity3d manual

 

✓ Import 3D-Scanned Models from 

  • Take about 20 photos around the object you want to 3D scan of(360 degrees!).
  • Upload the photos to 123D Catch.
  • Yeah now you’ll have both .obj model file and texture file!
  • Just download the file, and drag whole folder into the Asset folder of Unity!

 

POSSIBILITIES

  • Gain accessibility for people who can’t visit the museum in person.
  • Installation design simulation.

 

Thank_to

It’s really a good experience interning at MediaLab of Met. I know I want to keep working on 3D and also step into virtual reality world with Oculus Rift, and it’s a great match that I can have this topic as my own project, and also match to the needs of Met! From this internship, I gained valuable resources from the museum, and also knowing amazing mentors and colleagues from Labs. This project leads me to the world of virtual reality and I’m glad and also thankful that I’m a Spring 14′ intern of Media Lab of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

study note_{Three.js}

By jhclaura in Coding for Emotional Impact, Spring 2014 0 Comment

3D in Web journey starts! Trying to convert last week’s sketch from Processing into Three.js. But can’t finished it by Monday for the class, still in progress… Here’s what I got so far(WARNING: ROUGH), and below are the notes on translating Processing into JavaScript. Will organized it once I finish the work. Stay tuned!

Experience I learned from banging my head against bloody wall

  1. put your codes in function and then execute them by calling the function
    • tried to rotate my goddamn tetrahedron without doing this and had been failing for nearly 2 hours, just kept failing and failing and failing….
  2. OOP
    • links
      • https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Introduction_to_Object-Oriented_JavaScript
      • http://stackoverflow.com/questions/572897/how-does-javascript-prototype-work
      • https://github.com/shiffman/The-Nature-of-Code-Examples-p5.js/issues/8
      • http://javascriptissexy.com/javascript-prototype-in-plain-detailed-language/
      • https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Object/prototype
      • http://www.objectplayground.com/
  3. color
    • if using HSL, material.color.setHSL( h, s, l); –> *careful* can’t set s, l both to 1, it’d be white even though h < 1
  4. Web Audio API
    • http://srchea.com/experimenting-with-web-audio-api-three-js-webgl
  5. Clickable!!
    • http://soledadpenades.com/articles/three-js-tutorials/object-picking/
    • http://threejs.org/examples/canvas_interactive_cubes.html
    • http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11036106/three-js-projector-and-ray-objects

{FungU} Concept and prototype with 3D model

By jhclaura in Blog, Fungus Among Us, Spring 2014 0 Comment

test1.0006

notes

test1.0001

test1.0005

test1.0004

Idea

Mycelium covers all over the Earth and is aware of what’s going on up there. Its decomposing ability is the key of the nutrient cycling system, and can also degrade or remove toxins from the environment. Those newly learned information inspired me to be a missioner of fungus, broadcasting what fungus has done for the planet, so this is a project based on the perspective of fungus. Magnifying what fungus does by present it as a creature with thoughts.

Content

When no one’s near, the projector projects(or screen behind plays) the collage of the mycelium activities(growing, moving, decomposing, degrading pollution etc.) video footages, representing what fungus is doing right now. When someone comes near(detected by ultrasonic sensor), the image changes into camera view, and viewer will be capped with oyster mushroom cap(using OpenCV), a light-hearted way to show how close we are to fungus, to intrigue to be aware of what fungus is doing, and hopefully to make us be the positive force for the Earth, like fungus, instead of being a negative influence.

Materials

  • Mushroom: Oyster Mushroom
    • commonly seen, edible, easily growing, can break down the pesticides, petroleum based contaminants and hydrocarbons based pollutants)
  • Cap: Cork shaped as net, wrapping logs to grow out mushroom
  • Body: Mycelium
  • Base: soil in wood box

(3D model made in Maya)