In Between(Ongoing)
When the light gradually dimmed, your world only this small clay in front of you, in the warm yellow spotlight, it quietly rotating, in the process of shaping, fingertip contact with the virtual clay pot slow changes and breathing the rhythm of the aperture, to help you free from the pressure and complexity of reality, put all your attention on the shape of the clay pot. It’s a hand-tracking mindfulness pottery MR application, use pottery shaping as an anchor, guide users to immerse themselves into a peaceful journey. Traditional virtual pottery always takes offline real pottery processes as the standard and becomes a pottery simulator. Traditional virtual meditation experience is also the element of recreating offline meditation (natural landscape, voice guidance, white noise, etc.). If virtual reality is to achieve complete detachment and immersion, mixed reality is the best embodiment of eclecticism. In mixed reality, there are more possibilities, so that the virtual elements fully play the magic of imagination on the real world objects, so that we can walk freely between the real and virtual boundaries. This is where the title "In Between" comes from.
Technical Implementation
Difficulty analysisThe most basic difficulty of this design lies in the way to realize the damage caused by the hand to the pottery pot, and how to control the change of the pottery pot through gesture simulation. The most direct way of injury is to increase the impact body in the hand. However, due to my unfamiliarity with the software, I tried many methods at the beginning but could not find a way to increase the circumference of the ceramic pot, only to reduce it. Therefore, I tried to detect the way of "moving direction and distance from the hand to the center of the ceramic pot", but found after practice that, Hand movement requires very accurate detection to accurately judge the way of injury to the pottery pot. The effect is not good after use, and finally I return to the way of hand collision body, and successfully solve the problem that the circumference of the pottery pot cannot be increased. In terms of operation gestures, it is very natural for offline pottery to deform in the contact part due to the real reflection of the physical world, while virtual pottery needs to fix gestures to facilitate computer recognition, and the deformation direction needs to be locked by different gestures. In the end, pointer and pinch are chosen as the two most basic gestures. Even though these two gestures do not simulate and restore the gestures of offline pottery, the most important thing is that they are obviously a pair of opposite gestures, and they are simple and clear, easy to recognize and easy to remember. At the same time, as a mindfulness activity, the simplicity of gestures can focus more energy on the process of mindfulness.
Two other issues that stopped my progress were: 1) passthrough doesn't work with glow effect. This is also a problem that the system has not had time to repair, but the demand is very wide, in theory there is no reason that it can not be used at the same time, but due to the conflict of rendering Settings, the two can not coexist. 2) How to fix the injury point on the tip of the finger. After realizing the fact that "due to hand tracking, the coordinate points of the hand are generated by the code in real time after running", the problem was gradually solved. Even if these two problems are solved in the end, the time spent in the process of consulting data and researching on your own is hard to forget.
Scene visual designI also give some thought to the design of the whole picture. Since meditation is the purpose, all colors should be soft and soft. I hope to make it colorful as much as possible, because the positive influence of rich colors on psychology is intuitive, but it should not attract too much attention. In the shader design of the tank, the movement of the horizontal strip texture from the bottom to the top is to imitate the changes caused by the stress surface of the ceramic pot after rotation in reality, and the reflection is set to light blue, which is also to simulate the reflection of the clay after mixing water in the ceramic art in reality. At the same time, the external changing aperture is the same color, and the visual transition will be more natural. One thing I can't see is that I set a purple spotlight on the right front of the pot, so the pot will have a gradual change from pink purple to yellow to blue. The light beam on the top also plays a great role in creating the whole atmosphere. The overall design is inspired by the stage light, hoping to create the effect of "a quiet corner in a noisy world". I am also very happy with the final visual effects.
UI designAlthough the parts that require interaction have been simplified as much as possible, there needs to be clear and understandable beginner guides for people who have never used VR devices before. In this part, I use as slow as possible to switch the way objects appear and disappear, so as to fit the theme of "meditation". At the same time, a certain dynamic UI will make it more vivid and delicate, improve some details that may not be noticed, and add a short piece of code to improve the texture.