Welcome to back to Design Dairies week 11, where I will continue to update on my Unity Development Experience. You will notice I skipped week 10. Pudgy Cat passed away that week and I was no where near in the headspace to make things, but I am now caught up on VR development and making pretty things again. I am super proud of this little project I made this week.
After way too many hours of debugging it, I got Gaia Procedural Worlds cooperating with my Meta Quest 2. I was able to build a small island that you point and click to move around and explore in Virtual Reality. It had so many issues with syncing in the first few versions. It turns out I need to keep Vulcan enabled for it to work. Then it only showed up in one of the eyes for the Meta Quest. Some googling helped make that work though. Now I have some frame rate issues still, but in general it works okay and it looks pretty.
I attempted to do a really cool thing and integrate Spotify into it. I wanted to be used for mediation where you could pick a world, sit down in a nice spot and turn on a mediation playlist from Spotify. Needless to say, there was only one Spotify asset in the asset store and it did not work as I wanted it to.
I tried another plan and just imported the sound. I set up a Canvas, added some buttons, made an empty game objects with an audio source, and programed the buttons to play and pause the audio source. It worked on the computer, but when I opened it on the Meta Quest, it made my app glitchy and the buttons did not show up. Maybe I can get that working for next time.
For now check out this video with my OBS Stream of the Unity piece followed by the Meta Quest stream. The first attempt didn't record my screenshare of the VR set, so give it like a minute after I switch to the headset and I get it up and running. Check out what I made this week.
For my final project I want to expand upon this virtual world building and make a world that you can explore. I would like to add some interactivty to it, but I am not entirely sure what exactly I want to do. Maybe make a house that you can go inside and role dice to play a virtual game.
The difference between building for AR and VR is interesting in terms of the fact that they are both interactive, but in very different ways. In one you interact with a physical object to make a virtual object appear, in the other you interact in a virtual world with virtual objects that you give physical properties to. For me AR is more about coming off the screen and VR is more about immersing yourself inside the screen.