Robot Diaries is well underway and I’ve been due to share a little bit about my learnings on technology I’ve been using. For this project, I chose to work with Mozilla Hubs. If you haven’t heard about it, it is a web-based tool which is used to collaborate in private 3D visual spaces. I decided to work with it as currently, it’s the only software to view VR spaces simultaneously on PCs and VR headsets. Moreover, Mozilla Hubs also has its free world-building software Spoke. In cases where you don’t have many headsets kicking about and would like to use a PC to access VR, it is a pretty good tool. Especially as it is web-based, so the only limitation in terms of access is wifi’s bandwidth. When planning Robot Diaries I wanted to make sure that I can provide workshops where participants not only immerse themselves in the VR world but also get their hands dirty and create their own VR spaces. As software like Blender or game engines have a high learning curve that didn't seem like an option, hence my final decision was to go with Mozilla’s Hubs. In terms of creating for Mozilla Hubs, it comes with a repository of architecture elements so you can start building straight away. It also has elements like lighting, spawn points, audio, and even particle emitter. You can plugin objects from Sketchfab (online repository of 3D objects). However, as fantastic as it sounds it is an online tool so there are certain limitations. I’m going to warn you here, I’m about to get a little bit technical. Firstly, projects have a limit of 128 MB, and then there are limits on polygon count, lighting, materials and textures. Might sound quite limiting but even if you end up going over some of the limits on these you might still manage to publish your work onto Mozilla Hubs. To keep yourself in check you might want to publish your created space as you go along to keep checking your stats. Especially, when working with objects from Sketchfab, these are not optimised for Mozilla Hubs and often are way over polygon count. Small tip when searching for objects on Sketchfab select downloadable, type in ‘low poly’ and you can check the triangles count of the object in the description. Another thing to help with the optimisation of the experience is to make sure lights and shadows are ‘baked in’. This especially applies to objects brought into Spoke for example from Sketchfab. To bake in lights, materials and textures you’ll need to use other software like Blender. It is worth mentioning here that the way things look on a PC might differ from the headset. So again, keep testing as you build to check how the lighting, materials and textures work across platforms. However, if you stick with low poly objects and you’re mindful of all the limitations you should be fine. Another workaround in terms of bringing more complex objects is placing them into the scene once the scene has been created and published. Objects need to be pinned in the scene otherwise they will disappear. Another great thing about Mozilla Hubs is placing videos and media content in VR spaces. Again there are limitations on what you can bring as it is an online tool and if using YouTube and these two programs would need to connect for the video to work. I found that not all videos would play especially those with high resolution, so again you might need to test as you go along or otherwise download the media and place them as a file using Spoke. There is probably loads more I don't know about but I found this useful guide with further troubleshooting in case you're interested: https://cpb-ap-se2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.auckland.ac.nz/dist/b/596/files/2019/04/DRH-SPOKE-DRAFT.pdf Well let’s face it you’ll not build first-world graphics using this tool but for what you get I think it’s pretty good: free VR spaces for up to 25 participants, an online-based easy to use editor, pc and VR headset accessibility. For purpose of Robot Diaries it's been a great tool, however, limitations on graphics have caused me some serious troubles but it's all a learning experience ;)
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AuthorI'm an actress, writer and producer. My mantra: write, perform, repeat. Archives
May 2023
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