What Did I Learn?

I learned a great deal through the process of creating this project. First of all our team was great. I think all of us are creatives. On the one hand we did not have a "task master" type role, on the other hand we had so many ideas!

With this type of project the scope can easily get out of hand. With all of our brains buzzing we started out of the gate with a flood of ideas. What angle do we take? What is everyone interested in? We had so many directions to go it took us a while to get the ball rolling.

We identified early that we wanted to do something with 360 video and luckily my team mates had access to some hardware. After struggling with some scheduling issues (no task master...) we came together with a plan. Heather and Andrew would be creating some 360 video content and I would dig into Google Cardboard. We would house all of the content on this website and hopefully it would all come together!

I learned so much during my investigation of Google Cardboard. From a starting point of knowing nothing, I quickly assembled some glasses and dove into all kinds of Cardboard applications. After using these applications I thought - can I create a virtual reality application? Would it take too long? What does it take?

I took deep dives into LeapMotion software and other VR software but at various points hit road blocks. The main obstacle being I do not own a VR device and at the moment can not afford one. Luckily I found some pretty decent documentation for getting a Google Cardboard application running and I was off to the races!

I quickly learned that the process to develop this software was not exactly straightforward. I would be attempting to make a simple guide for a novice to create a Cardboard application from scratch. What I realized is that there is a lot more software involved than I expected. There is no magical one application that will do everything for you. You need to install a game engine (Unity) and multiple SDK's (Android, Google VR). You need to configure your phone and development environment to use the SDK's and then actually make a project and build it. A lot of moving parts!

The first big lesson learned from this project was how to create Google Cardboard applications. This took a lot of time and investigation but was well worth it in the end. The second lesson is in communication with group work. I have a tendency to silo off and kind of do my own thing which does not work for this type of project. I need to get better at being more responsive and communicating within groups.

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