THE PORCELAIN DRAGON
Vietnamese Dragon - Avatar - The God of Rain
SHOWCASE
In order to prepare for the showcase, I volunteered to be the designer
of the whole class's showcase poster. 2D Design is my strength and I want to
be able to contribute to the whole preparation for the showcase.
My dragon along with 4 other avatars are assigned in the same group: Asian Cultures.
Our Avatars are based on cultural themes, so when they stand together in the same scene,
it looks really impressive.
PUBLICITY TEAM
takes care of publicity activities for showcase
ASIAN CULTURES TEAM
a scene consists of 5 cultural-inspired avatar
PUBLICITY TEAM
Poster Design Process
As a poster designer, I had to ask everyone in the class to send me over their Avatar's files ( including their FBX and texture files) in order for me to put them all together in a scene in Unity. However, I could not be able to have everyone sent me their files so I had to stop receiving files from everyone and worked with what I had. At first, I just realized that if everybody just sends me the avatar model and texture files, all of the avatars will stand on T-pose. It looks kinda strange and quirky, however, I find the end result really satisfying. No other poster like this has been done before. It is one-of-a-kind.
In the process of designing, I had also have to think about the copy that will be on the poster. I tried to think of sentences that could capture people's attention, meanwhile being understandable and approachable. I also asked other members and our classmates to evaluate the quality of the poster before publishing it. I am very happy that everyone seems to really like it.
Final Poster
When I finished designing the poster, the other teammates in the Publicity Team take care of printing and hanging them in core areas for others to acknowledge our showcase. Also, we asked Tony - president of Digital Media Club to take care of our social media presence, and our Poster was featured on RMIT Digital Media Club page. Yayy
Taking Pictures and Filming the Showcase
To record the happening process of our showcase, I asked everyone in the Team if they had any cameras or filming devices that could be used. One device would focus on taking pictures of the day, and the other device would focus only on filming. I also asked them to bring the Tripod to maximize the stability and quality of the footage taken, and it is a lot easier to edit those videos later if they are not shaky or blurry. Thanks God everyone in our team got a camera, and we also got a tripod as well.
After the showcase, we have created a folder and uploaded all of our media. Now I wil be the person who takes care of sorting and editing them into a short video of our class's project. I think by the end of June, this video will be published and sent to lecturers as well as Digital Media Club in order to publish them online again. By that way, we could introduce our project to more and more people.
ASIAN CULTURES TEAM
Avatar Integration Project
Thanks to our classmates' brilliant ideas and contribution to solving all of the Technical Issue for the Integration Project, and also the tutorials are given so clear and instructive, it is so much easier for us to prepare our files for the Integration. I just followed the tutorial given on Canvas, applied some minor adjustments since my dragon is different than other avatars ( Hoan Dang advised me to do this since he knows this best). I packaged them all together and uploaded on Canvas for my team leader to put everything into a scene.
The end result is pretty impressive. However, there are some minor bugs that need to be fixed for each avatar. In VR, my avatar pretty much is the one which is the hardest for users to experience the embodiment. Since the nose of the dragon is too big and long, and the dragon's arms are too tiny, players cannot see their body parts move along as clearly as other avatars. However, I don't want to fix this because I think this is the part of becoming another, becoming an unfamiliar creature and feel the uneasiness, the abnormal movements of our body.
Final Showcase and Reflection
Me and a few other team members are at RMIT Media Portal earlier and prepare for the setup. I brought everyone some pastries and cinnamon donuts, as a snack and also as a treat for the players who participate. They seem to really like it having the embodiment experience and the food and chat afterward. Everything went smooth. Due to everybody's requests, our class decided to have the 2 themes run the 2 projects together at the same time, so they don't have to wait until another time to experience another. So the showcase happened from 2:30 pm to 6:30 pm. It is quite a longer time than we expected so we have to take turns explaining and instructing players. However, it was fun seeing the expressions of the users when they could understand the game and switching between the avatars. Me and our team members stayed until the end to help with the pack-up as well.
Of all the participants, there is one special player who sits on the wheelchair. She wants to try VR but having that physical challenge makes it more difficult for her to experience the embodiment. However, thanks to our teamwork in helping her and guiding her, also making sure everything is safe, she was able to try out the experience and was very very amazed when she could switch between the avatars.
This situation poses a new question for me: " Is VR for anyone? How could we make VR experiences accessible to people who have physical disability?" This could be a really interesting problem that still in need of innovative solutions in the future.
Many people are really impressed with the shadow ninja and the Bian-Lian master. They love the interaction on these two avatars. With my dragon, some of them said they wish they could have the mirror in front of them so they could see their body moves without having to turn their heads down and look at the shadow to see their dragon body. This is the point that I should have taken. I think if I integrate some kind of mirroring objects in front of the dragon, the experience would become more engaging.
What I also did not have a chance is to fully explain to all of the players about the concept of my project, and how I am able to translate the stiff human body movements into the smooth and waggy movements of the dragon after many, many experiments testing and fixing and adjusting. This issue also applied to other team member's avatar. The players just jumped into the scene and we could only answer their questions about our avatars if they ask. I think the players would be more satisfying and impressed if they could have more time to fully understand the deep concept and the cultural materials applied to each avatar before jumping into the embodiment experience.
During the showcase, we also found that the height of players could affect the position of the camera. If they are taller than the camera position, the camera could run outside of the avatar.
Overall, the showcase went well, many people were very impressed and said that they had never experienced anything like this before, and this could not be successful without the contribution for every team members. Our team and our class have done such great work. We are all very proud of what we have achieved and learned throughout the course with our lecturer Stephanie.