Week 7

Week 7 began with our usual Monday meeting where we discussed the up in coming week. We planned to do presentations of our current virtual environment on the following day. During this time we would dicuss our progress and give tips on future steps. We also set our goals for the week. My goals for this week were to continue Unity Tutorials, Research for the ASCII code interaction, begin implementing the ASCII code interaction, and to continue working on my Final Report. When discussing the goals that we had set for the week my Mentor suggested that we wait to work on the ASCII code animation due to the lengthy nature of that portion. Instead we decided to begin working on the animation that highlights different portions of the code based on the press of a button.

Tuesday was our presentation day. We met at our usual time on zoom and discussed our progress. Nyala Jackson, an undergraduate student working on a virtual reality environment very similar to mine, presented her current project first. She is creating her environment using React 360 and her project is coming along very nicely. I presented my project after her and communicated my findings from the previous week. After our meeting I began to research the best way to go about the ASCII code interaction and found that I would have to create two portals in my environment. However, this would be a very lengthly part of my project to complete and decided to begin on my button for the highlighted code animation. For this animation I would need to create a button. I began to do research on the best way to create a 3D button in Unity because again I did not want to have to download this asset from the asset store. This is where I ran into a few difficulties with my project. The button I wanted to create needed to have custom C# scripts attached to it. However, in order to edit a script I would need the right script editing software and ultimatly downloaded the incorrect software. This caused a huge error in my project that turned off my virtual reality support. After consulting with my mentor in our follow up meeting on Friday we discovered that I had one or more XR SDK provider packages installed. Luckily I had my project pushed to GitHub right before this error occurred and made plans to clone the previous version of my project the following week.

Written on July 13, 2020