Day 4/Day 5

I forgot to write a blog on Friday so this is a combination of Friday's work and today.

My main goal for Friday was to set up a better testing environment and to work with the newly released Interaction Engine module from Leap Motion to make interaction with the boxes slightly better. I was pretty happy with final product. I used a furniture pack from the asset store for a table for the boxes because I'm not quite sure how I would of created that in Unity (side note, might look into that) and then I used the Interaction Engine prefabs for the boxes. I also had to add an Interaction Manager to my Head Mounted Rig.

Further I kept working on the Mini in game user interface to practice a little but more using scripts in Unity and created a new button that creates a new box each time it's pushed. Also as an aside I fixed the dim lighting reset issue with the help of Jonny by going:

Window > Lighting  > Settings > Untick Auto Generate > Generate Lighting

ADD SCREEN CAST OF WHAT'S HAPPENING

Recreating Sam's Demo 

Today's main goal is going to be about recreating Sam's Demo from scratch. The steps to this would probably be:

1. Getting a desk mounted version of the leap hands up and running instead of head mounted like I've been using
2. Create the play objects (Maybe use Interaction Engine prefabs to make this more smooth)
3. Create the user interface
4. See if I can switch between capsule hands and rigged hands via the interface

1. So making a desk mounted version was as easy as a check box for one of the scripts in which you could unselect the is Head Mounted box. The remaining issue is though that the hands are flipped upside down where the left hand is the right in VR as well the hands facing upwards instead of down. For now I'll continue using head mounted as this seems to be the Unity standard for now, and in the future if we find it's not working good enough we could change it?

2. Creating the card board boxes. I decided to use the interaction Engine prefab cubes because they are already set up to interact well with the leap hands. When working with the texture from what I could tell Sam took photos of an actual cardboard box to make his boxes look life like.

• To do this it looks like he's used a mesh. I don't quite understand what these are so for now I've just used a cardboard like photo to make a material to render the boxes sorta similar. Later on I will work out how to do this properly.
  
   
• The other thing that isn't quite the same is the way we interact with the boxes, Sam's don't use Gravity so they float. If I do this they tend to float away when I try to pick them up. I would have to keep trialing the physics. 

3. The User Interface in Sam's Demo is just a plane with an image attached so this was relatively easy to reconstruct. The buttons were then just 2d colliders I think so that's what I've done to recreate them. After adding the UI the too look visually similar but don't share much in functionality yet

My Version of Sam's Demo

Sam's Demo

• The tricky part of this is using the mouse to select the buttons because the VR automatically makes it invisible. Looking at Sam's code I still don't quite understand what is going on so that might be my goal for today.

Adding Functionality

The first and easiest step will be to add the keyboard shortcuts to the functions that I already know how to replicate. At this stage that will just be the reset button with the R key. 

Post Holger Meeting:

Goals for December

• No need for mouse interaction, come up with a more natural way
• Think about adding UI under the camera
• Look into mapping textures onto 3d objects
• Think about where to mount the leap (reflective surface if from above) on 
• Real world coordinates
• Take parts that work from Sam's demo and add