Meetup 2022 02 25
In this session, we welcomed first-time joiners who came from diverse backgrounds such as Digital Art, UX, and Machine Learning. There is a lot of curiosity to learn about XR technologies.
One of the recommended paths for newcomers is to check out Unity essentials. The tutorial is designed to guide you step by step to get familiar with Unity Editor and the basics to start working with Unity projects.
During the session, our newcomers Nadia and Sarai did a great job setting up their environment quickly and started learning with a fun Lego Microgame!
As we know it might be difficult to get familiar with Unity the first time, Maria gave a quick overview of the Unity Interface.
We wish them to continue with curiosity and excitement their journey into XR, and we'd love to learn about their progress in future events!
Yuri visited the session for the first time. She focused on learning Unreal experimenting on architectural modeling, land placement, object generation, material changes, light, camera movement, video generation, and basic UI.
During the session, she designed an interesting aesthetic building structure with beautiful graphics and practiced the concepts she was studying.
Yuri also shared her background in Digital Arts (UX Designer, New Media Artist) and her creative interactive work that combines digital flowers animation interacting with music. Check out her creative Flower Performance design at DESIGNARTTOKYO2021 exhibition.
Her work creates a complex effect of non-verbal communication in space, an opportunity to imagine the sensations of others, a back and forth between digital and physical, and a cross-modal sensation. It takes MIDI signals into the Unreal Engine and applies the rules of the color circle to generate the flowers. You can see more of here work here:
We would love to know more about her experience in Digital Art and how she is moving her skills into XR in the future.
If you are interested in Unreal check out these free resources in English or Japanese
Maria was exploring the Creative Core unity pathway. Although she already has experience with VR and Unity, she wanted to strengthen the essential concepts about Lighting, Animation, and VFX to create beautiful VR experiences.
Her time was dedicated to focusing on the concepts and reading. She continued her study about rendering pipelines (a series of operations that take the contents of a Scene and display them on a screen). Unity includes three types: Built-in Render pipeline, Universal Render Pipeline (URP), High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). It is important to understand their differences to make the right decision for your project early in development because it is difficult to switch between them once you start.
She is using the Universal Render Pipeline in her project because it supports a wide range of platforms from mobile to high-end consoles, PCs, and VR devices.
Here are some of the resources from her study:
As most of the participants came from UI/UX backgrounds, she shared with us an interesting article to get inspiration and learn from others' experiences transitioning from traditional UX into Extended Reality applications.
Patricia was experimenting with Mixed Reality and Digital Twins by following the Microsoft path Build Mixed Reality Digital Twins with Azure Digital Twins and Unity.
The objective of the study is to create an application for Mixed Reality that operates a fictional wind farm using Digital-Twins. It uses fictional assets of the wind farm, captures operational sensor data of wind turbines (the data is a simulation), and it will be integrated with Azure services to monitor the operational state of the wind turbines such as power, ambient temperature, and simulated events.
During the session she completed module 2, working with two types of geographical prefab objects in the Scene:
- A static terrain that is stored locally (useful for disconnected experiences), where images or data don't change much.
- A dynamic terrain that is loaded at a run time (useful where the object is connected to data that changes constantly). In this project, the dynamic terrain is connected to Bings Map SDK to load satellite images of the sample terrain.
The next image shows the running application, and how the interaction with the terrain objects looks like using a hand ray pointer. It is possible to grab and move the object (it can be placed on a surface when using Hololens).
She plans to continue working on this project and share more during the next session.
We all enjoyed learning from each other’s interest in XR.
We hope to see you in the next session and we are excited to keep welcoming new people to this community. Check out our events at Women Who Code Tokyo.
Note: the images in this wiki have exclusive rights for Women Who Code Tokyo and the participants.