Unity Prototyper reel:
- Anastasia Kinzel
- Oct 3, 2016
- 2 min read
Recently I compiled some of my best work from my work at Microsoft. During my position as a Unity Prototyper, I have worked on many different research and exploration projects. Most of which were developed with VR (Oculus), and Leap Motion in mind. Within the demo reel there are three projects.
The first, which is a prototype of a social space within VR, was an idea sparked from needing a hub for players to access multiple facets of the XBOX dashboard, such as games, friends, and achievements. In this portion of the demo you can see that there are objects within the room that are representative of the player's achievements. One of our ideas was that if you receive an achievement that you would receive an item in your room that was a physical depiction of that achievement. Another idea we needed to figure out was how players would interact with friends. In this concept we had a friend in the room with the player, that the player can interact with, thus triggering a social wheel to spawn. This project was just an iteration to try to figure out answers to some of these problems. My main responsibilities were setting up the character, including it's animations which was downloaded from Mixamo.com. I also lit the entire scene, and applied textures. I using C# I scripted all of the features scene, such as the cursor changing color, the teleporting of the character, and the item pickups and movements. I also did the effect to represent where the players could teleport to.
The second portion of the video is a research project wherein which I was attempting to connect a model to the controls of the Leap Motion, within VR space. For this to work I had to rig and weight the new model so that it's joints would match up with those of the Leap Motion. I also had to learn the pipeline, within Unity, to set up custom hands, with documentation provided by Leap Motion's website. As you can see within the video the movements, albeit a little unpredictable, do follow the movements of my own hand, and are moving in a fairly realistic way. This project could easily be built upon to incorporate on to a full body rig, and could therefore allow for a more immersive experience within VR space.
Finally the statistics homepage. This mockup was yet another solution for trying to figure out what a character's home screen or statistics hub would look like. Through many iterations we finally found a design that we thought was efficient. The UI wheel that appears was designed by Ashley Wang, ashleywang.net. The models, both the charcter and the background model were also not done by me. My main task was to script, using C# the functionality of this wheel, and how it worked in tandem with the rectangular UI elements. Using the Canvas system within Unity I was able to arrange elements so that they would transform a certain way depending on input. I also set up the character (once again downloaded from Mixamo.com) and lit the scene.
All projects were programmed for and XBOX one Controller, and to be used in the Oculus headset.
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