Reflecting on Project 1

Group 13: Jae Rim Choi

One project I reviewed was group 13, Jae Rim Choi’s room. What I found to be the most interesting aspect of the room was his take on re-creating virtual spaces with inspiration from images in the real world. He did this twice with the couch towards the back of his room as well as with the wall of paintings. Apparently he made all of those structures in Blender, and I thought that was quite amazing because I am not particularly good at creating 3D objects myself. Below is a screenshot detailing objects he created and others he obtained from online. The purple ones indicate objects he created in Blender while the orange tags indicate ones he downloaded online.

Unfortunately I cannot run his app on my machine because I have a Mac and do not have a VMware installed, but I was able to test out the app in the classroom. Many objects in the scene were grabbable and throwable. He also had some interesting hidden easter eggs in the room such as the tiny chair inside the drawer and the secret monitor that Rick-rolled you if you touched it, albeit the Rick-roll was a bit touchy and didn’t work all the time.

In general, I enjoyed the look and feel of the room itself. It looked really clean and I enjoyed the color schemes throughout. It looked well thought out in terms of his stylistic decisions, and all of the objects looked and felt to be pretty close to human scale. The tiny chair inside the drawer was quite silly and the Rick-roll a nice touch. Again, the room was really pretty to look around in.

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Group 9: Aldo Alvarez

I also wanted to reflect on group 9, Aldo Alvarez’s project. His room featured a lot of little mini games, which I found to be quite charming, and a lot of interactable objects. For such a relatively small space, he was able to divide his office into what I see as 5 separate spaces. He had a personal office within his space as well as a space for workstations, an entertainment area, a concessions area, and a small meeting room. Although he managed to fit all of that in the space of our classroom, I thought it was quite crowded. If it were in the real world, I’d imagine that getting around would be quite difficult whereas in VR we can float through things at our expense.

There were so many interactable objects in his office, my favorites being the ping pong table and the jenga blocks. Both aren’t actually difficult to implement in Unity but these two little things really caught my attention out of all the other things in his room. His musical blocks were also quite interesting; in class he had said that he was trying to implement a functional keyboard into his office and I actually wanted to do the same but with a full grand piano. Though mapping sounds to objects isn’t difficult, it is time consuming especially when it comes to finding or recording those sounds and then putting them in each key. The little pokemon characters throughout the room were fun to mess around with too because they made noises when you grabbed them

As for Aldo’s sense of style, I noticed that the color scheme in the room was very repetitive. It consisted of the same yellow, red, and green throughout the white room with just a few touches of brown wood and blue colors. The ceiling was also the same green and yellow color but I wish that he had incorporated different colors throughout rather than having everything be the same three colors. The effect of everything being those same three colors kind of had me disoriented when navigating the room because everything kind of looked the same. I would have liked to see more colors and textures throughout the space.

All in all, Aldo had a solid application with lots of stuff to do and lots of technical perks within the room. He also included a dimmer switch in his meeting room which I thought was pretty cool. Though he included many things to do, I thought the overall ‘design’ of the space was quite crowded and not very aesthetically pleasing. But I enjoyed playing with the ping pong balls and the Jenga blocks, I found this room to be the most fun out of the ones I saw presented in class.