Our last week of research began as usual with our Monday meeting. We decided that Thursday would be the day to present our Virtual Environments on Zoom. I still had many items on my goals list for the week. I had to finish my Final Research Report, debug my button that I had added to the scene, finish The Unity Tutorial for creating VR Experiences, and try to implement the ASCII portal animation. As the week began I was excited to begin these tasks, but I had no clue what obsticles were in store for the week.

After the Monday zoom call I began to try and debug my script. For some reason my hand was not being detected. I found after doing some research that a Rigidbody component should be added to at least one game object in order to detect a collision. If you are using the Rigid body on your button you should turn off the “Use Gravity” setting or it will fall through the table. I also added a collider component to the OVR Player Controller left hand anchor and right hand anchor. In the past I had tried adding a sphere collider directly to each custom hand but that caused an error when I loaded my project to my Oculus Quest. I also had to change the Tag to “Player” for my OVR Player Contoller and for the virtual hands because that is the tag that my code would be looking for. When I tested this the first highlighted line of code disappeared, which is what it is supposed to do. However the second line did not get enabled. That evening a hurricane warning was announced and by Tuesday morning all of the power was out in my area. This power outtage would affect how much time I had left on my project. I was briefly able to get some WiFi and got to work on my Final Report. Wednesday came along and the power was still out in many parts of the area, due to a tree that had came down on one of our main power lines. Luckily, around 3 o’clock the power was back up. Because I would be presenting my project the following day I went back to work on getting my button working. I discovered that the reason the highlight was not enabling was because instead of diabling the mesh collider I had disabled the entire object. This was a quick fix and finally my button script worked. I decided to create 8 of these buttons to allow for the user to step through the code. I had to change up the scripts slightly for each button but it was a success. On Thursday, I finished my final report and looked up the best way to cite my references using Overleaf. The best way to do this is by creating a bibliography file and adding the LaTex code from each reference. These can be found on Google Scholar. You then want to use the biblatex package and add your bib resource. Specific commands used when citing can be found on the Overleaf website. At 1 o’clock we met on zoom to present our projects. I presented first and then Nyala Jackson presented her Virtual Environment created using React360. After our presentation we got any questions answered and had a discussion about Graduate school. Dr. Anderson also asked that we both include the packages and specifics on our projects under the ReadMe of our repositories on GitHub. After our meeting I edited my ReadMe file on GitHub to include those specifics. We met again on Friday for our final follow up meeting of the summer. This meeting was a bitter sweet moment. We have learned and accomplished much but it’s sad to have this experience end. I’m very grateful to have been able to make these connections and will continue to keep in touch with my DREU team.