Author: Alexa Donahue

We presented a much more polished idea in the final crit compared with the mid crit.

We can say confidently that we made a lot of progress.

Overall, I believe we received very good feedback and most expectations were met.

There were some comments regarding the shaders and the models and some textures but we said we were planning on improving that in the future .

Here is the link to the presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1B471UQG8iMVsAsg9uVUVppuml5pc0zQRbAMJfABY9HI/edit?usp=sharing

Modelling update.

I started modelling the artist’s objects as well as George Pinwell’s room

George Pinwell is a very old artist from the 1800s. Which is why there is not a lot of information on himself of where he lived. Which is why I made a lot of research to ensure that I was referencing him correctly, I decided to model the room based on the backgrounds oh his sketches.

I wasn’t very involved these past ten days as I’ve been travelling but I was keeping in touch with the rest of the team and they made some changes/visual decisions. They were facing the following problems:

• The Layout was too simple and the art styles would not be visible from the other side of the circle
• It could turn easy or boring

These were their solutions:

• Add some interesting movement mechanics such as ladders, stairs, rock climbing, etc
• Update the layout for it to be more open

they also decided on a spacial/heavenly aesthetic which I think is very fitting for the theme as the goal is for it to be a mix between purgatory and a cemetery and it should refer to the afterlife.

They decided between two layouts so the goal is for us to test it on different users.

We started sketching out the rooms a little bit with the help of AI.

It gave us ideas on how we could lay out objects and portray in a better way all the graphic styles.

Additionaly we started splitting all the mechanics we need for the AR in order to develop the app. Mostafa, a member of our team, offered to take care of the technical AR aspects.

Based on my design of the circle of lebanon, I set up the base scene. It consists of a room, in which you have to grab an object and place it in a socket next to the wall. Once the socket touches the object, the door opens and leads you to a hallway that leads you to the circle.

This is a very basic first approach, the plan is to expand of this layout and the decorations.

I started modeling the circle of lebanon, a famous part of the highgate cemetery to add to our layout. This is how it looks. 

I am also going to start setting up the scene with the grabbing interactions and the locomotion system. I found out about sockets in the XR toolkit and I think that will be very useful for us. 

I need to start modelling the objects of each artist. Based on their paintings we decided on: a dog for Lucien Freud, a vase for Patrick Caufield and a harp for George Pinwell. 

We decided to change the AR idea.

We want to try and do an online multiplayer AR game of hide and seek where the user can choose if they want to be lear or the keeper.

It’s definitely a very ambitious project and all of the teachers adviced against it.

We are willing to try and it the worst case scenario we can always do some filters 🙂

After talking in several instances we decided to use the highgate cemetery as a way to showcase the visual artwork of some artists buried there. 

The story is that Edward Lear, a man who is famous for his fun illustrations and poems, likes to joke around and hide other artists’ objects. This causes the artists to leave their rooms in the highgate cemetery. The artists will leave a trail and affect everything around them with their artstyle, causing the cemetery to turn into a canvas, therefore the non-linearity. 

We are thinking about doing some filters in the selected artstyles for the AR but we’re not sure. 

As you can see, for the artists apart from Lear, we picked Patrick Caufield, Lucian Freud and George Pinwell, as all three of them have very different visual styles.