Two weeks later – I finally got my New User status. It was a little frustrating at the beginning. Based on the internet, I need 10 hours of gameplay to get to the New User status which allows me to upload Avatars and Worlds to the lab community. I did that but nothing happened. A kind player in VRChat told me that I need to make friends too. Oh, why I didn’t think of that. After I made one friend, the next time I logged in, I was promoted to New User. And I got this in the e-mail.
I brought the Gucci model into Maya and separate the shoes from the model they came with and put them on my VRChat avatar.
Install Unity 2018.4.20f1 that is recommended by VRChat.
Upload my Avatar by following this tutorial – in 5 minutes. https://vrchat.fandom.com/wiki/Quick_Start_-_Mixamo_Avatar_Creation I believe this was written for SDK2 but works for SDK3, especially when selecting the Animator Controller. I use the T-pose one from SDK3 and it works fine. I was able to upload, however, my sitting and ducking animations were messed up…
To make it work for both Quest and PC, I have to upload the avatar twice. Once in Windows mode and the other in Android mode. The official tutorial online recommends duplicating the project.
Just in a few hours, I am going to participate in the graduation ceremony for our Class 2021 cohort. I worked with a good portion of them extensively in their first year of school in virtual reality and playful experience design. I wanted to make something to remember them by. It is purely impulsive and based on no research or data. It is very last minute, but I decided to celebrate this moment with a new exit act.
After we moved the learning online after the pandemic last year, I have been experiment with different online identities. From animated characters with face tracking to cosmetic filters, it was an unexpected adventure into a world of digital tools that I didn’t care much for. During those experiments, I created a thing called exit acts – exit zoom meetings with style. I created one for taking off in a Gundam RX-78 and another one for flying away with Spike’s Swordfish II from Cowboy Bebop. Jamming it out with an EVA – 3 from Neo Genesis Evangelion seems like a reasonable next project.
MFADT Class 2021 Visual by @major_benny
My teaching assistant, Sharon, told me that the overall visual scheme of their thesis website was inspired by the color scheme of the animation -Evangelion. Time to collect some assets and put together a theme. I want to use a cityscape silhouette to create a high contrast between foreground and background similar to the technique used in some of the Fortnite banners.
SUSHI – 1 is pronounced as SHUSHI /ˈʃuːʃi/ One like how a 7th-grade kid would pronounce it. It is a pre-programmed wireless game controller breakout system made for young makers or creative individuals who are interested in tinkering with gaming interfaces with the burden of building electronics from the ground up.
A 3.5 mm Chassis Mount Stereo Jack Socket
Three soldering points from left to right: Left channel (tip), Right channel (ring), Ground (sleeve).
Giving a demonstration of my Qumarion setup in my AR Workshop 2015 with Shih Chien University in Taiwan
This is one of the longer journeys that I have gone through to figure something out. It took me about three years of on and off research in a language and a tech community I knew very little of. I was working on a project in Tokyo in 2012 and saw Qumarion for the first time at a computer store in Ikebukuro. It was a love of first sight because I was looking for alternative tools and pipelines for 3D modeling, rigging, and animation.
Unity’s Animation Rigging plug-in is capable of recording animation at runtime! “12:20 …and if I keep that change it will be saved to the clip so during gameplay animators can create new animations…”
I did an HID mouse demo last week using two potentiometers and two buttons. It worked out fine but was really difficult to use as an alternate game controller. I found a thumbstick module and it worked so much better than the setup I had. I wanted to mount the thumbstick module onto something to make it easier to handle. I looked around in the house and found this perfect empty chocolate container. The shape of the container provides a firm grip for my triggering hand.
“It is not sufficient to write programs that work. They must also be ‘elegant,’ either in code or function – both, if possible.”
J.M.Graetz
Martin Graetz recalled the development process behind the first video game – Spacewar! in a magazine interview. He mentioned that the quest for elegance in code and function was the reason why hackers at MIT were so involved in refining the game. Spacewar! was originally created on a PDP-1 which was capable of doing very simple mathematical calculations.
“on the early PDP-1s, anything stiffer than integer addition and subtraction had to be done by subroutine”
Creative Computing Magazine, August 1981
Keeping elegance in mind when facing the most restricted hardware limitations, creative coders haven’t changed a bit since 1962.
During the planning of a workshop on Motion Capture recently, I was thinking about what to demo right after calibration. I remembered when I visited Disney World last time, I saw a super cool live performance called “Turtle Talk with Crush!” I thought it would be interesting to map a rigid body to a digital character in Unity3D.
To take it to a next level, bundle it with a game controller and turn it into an interactive puppet rig! I 3D printed an add-on to my PS4 controller and quickly put together a scene with free assets and there we go! This little red ghost lost in the woods did the job for me.
I found an existing add-on on Thingiverse and modified it on Tinkercad. It is using hooks and a rubber band to hang on to the controller on the back. I tried to find an angle to print so I don’t have problems creating supports, especially where the hooks are.
(Space) Cauldron is an electronic board game for 2 ~ 4 players. Players (alchemists) have to collect the right ingredients and cook them in the cauldron. Every ingredient works differently and could either enhance or cancel other ingredients’ flavors. Whoever successfully cook the item(s) on their unique recipe card wins the game.
The inspiration for this idea came when I was looking at multi-RFID readers. The technology is being used in the casino to count RFID embedded chips and it can read more than 1000 chips at once accurately. I wanted it as a game controller. However, the first model that I looked at was too big. Recently, when I followed up with the vendor and asked for code samples, I found out they have a new board with a smaller factor.
HF Embedded RFID Reader [RL86A] – 150mm x 150mm
This board can read multiple RFID tags accurately but does not know the location of each chip on the board. The first mechanic that I thought of is some kind of mixing pot. A magic cauldron is the best mixing pot there is.
There is a Japanese amusement game called JARASTA (ジャラステ 2017) which uses similar technology in its’ gameplay. However, there is no mixing fun, but just an interesting way of reading multiple game items at the same time. The stirring pot mechanic wasn’t really playing an important role in the game. I am interested in making the stirring pot and mixing ingredients the mechanic of my game.
It is worth mentioning there is another game called ゾイドワイルド バトルカードハンター (ZOIDS World Battle Card Hunter) that comes out later and shares the same game cabinet with JARASTA.
For someone who doesn’t speak the language, I had to learn these amusement games with prior knowledge and lots of imagination. ZOIDS was not an intuitive game to pick up mostly because of the disconnection between the gaming hardware and the actual gameplay itself. I eventually found out the RFID reader was not even a part of the game at all. This must be a project on a budget.
int pinA = 9; // Connected to CLK on KY-040
int pinB = 6; // Connected to DT on KY-040
int encoderPosCount = 0;
int pinALast;
int aVal;
boolean bCW;
void setup() {
pinMode (pinA,INPUT);
pinMode (pinB,INPUT);
/* Read Pin A
Whatever state it's in will reflect the last position
*/
pinALast = digitalRead(pinA);
Serial.begin (9600);
}
void loop() {
aVal = digitalRead(pinA);
if (aVal != pinALast){ // Means the knob is rotating
// if the knob is rotating, we need to determine direction
// We do that by reading pin B.
if (digitalRead(pinB) != aVal) { // Means pin A Changed first - We're Rotating Clockwise
encoderPosCount ++;
bCW = true;
} else {// Otherwise B changed first and we're moving CCW
bCW = false;
encoderPosCount--;
}
Serial.print ("Rotated: ");
if (bCW){
Serial.println ("clockwise");
}else{
Serial.println("counterclockwise");
}
Serial.print("Encoder Position: ");
Serial.println(encoderPosCount);
}
pinALast = aVal;
}
Now the rotation only affects the bubbles. I had tried rotating the smoke as well, but my son thinks the whole pot is rotating. Maybe after adding floating objects/ingredients, the rotation will be more obvious.
Plants symbolized in the chant: Eye of newt – mustard seed. Toe of frog – buttercup leaves. Wool of bat – holly or moss. Tongue of dog – hounds tooth Adder’s fork – violet Blind worm’s sting – Knotweed Lizard’s leg – Ivy Howlet’s wing – garlic or maybe ginger (but garlic was more common)
There are variations but these are most common ones according here.
