Team objectives for Week 1: Re-design our story, and create a VR storyboard for one vignette!
Read Emily's lovely blog post here.
Story Outline Overhaul
Emily and I began the semester by rethinking our initial story outline. Over several meetings, we identified our favorite ideas for story vignettes and fleshed out a higher-level story to connect them. Our new story, which I summarized here, focuses on different themes (heritage and self-growth) and is significantly restructured.
VR Storyboarding in Oculus Quill
For context... in May, I put together a demo of one of our vignettes (an interactive 360* comic) in Unity. The incredibly tedious workflow: place each gif in the editor, write some code, play the scene, put on my headset, look around, decide that I want to move it ten pixels to the right, take off my headset, and repeat.
Our initial prototype. (This took forever.)
Obviously, we need to prototype our scenes. We need to go beyond traditional storyboards, because it's difficult to express a 360* space on paper. However, creating our prototypes in a game engine or animation program is inefficient and complicated for the reasons described above.
The solution: Oculus Quill! Quill is a 3D animation tool which allows you to paint and animate in VR with your controllers. I spent Summer 2020 learning the interface, and hope to use it for one of our vignettes.
My summer project: a 3D drawing of the Crystal Temple from Steven Universe. (This also took forever.)
After Emily sketched out some ideas for our new interactive comic vignette, I pulled her drawings into Quill. It was fast and easy to test different arrangements and animations, and then export the scene as a 360 photo. I never had to take off my headset or write a single line of code! I plan to storyboard every vignette like this for informal user testing. An animated gif of the scene is shown below, and a static 360* photo can be perused here.
