Tannan Explores Fake Reality

Brought in a house with a yard and mapped the fence line to the physical room. I also brought in an exterior 360 image to give me a sense of place to evaluate  a series of table designs.

I wanted to mention shadow really quickly as this is an often overlooked importance in a few respects to design. I think we use shadow often to understand scale and I find it helps when I stand in the place of my virtual character to see ‘my’ shadow on the ground.  Also many people have commented on how much they enjoy the shadow from brushes, and I noticed how lovely the shadow was in this table design (above). There is real opportunity to play with and understand, how a piece will exist in different light.

Bubble wall. Played around with creating a less distracting ‘boundary’ and found myself moving through the space quicker. I think this is because my brain knows it’s boundaries without having to remember or being ‘pulled-out’ of the experience by hitting the grid. The bubbles I found to be unobtrusive and provided a little movement in the scene which is normally very stale and artificial. 

Note: Max size single object that you can scale in TiltBrush is just over 40 feet (13.3 meters) so it helps if the distance between walls/ buildings etc is about that in order to keep your perspective somewhat in scale. 

So TiltBrush did a wonderful update. The ability to change the lighting has been fantastic. You can change the direction of shadow, primary and secondary color temperature and a fill light. This has been very helpful especially working in interior spaces. controlling light was one of the things that I was working on in unity with custom development and here Google has taken care of me. 

In regards to using a virtual body to help with scale and understand furniture objects it was wonderful and will not be part of my process for sure. 

If you look at the center chair on the pedestal you can see two black arms on the chair. I had discussed adding arms but there were so many options. I made a bunch and brought them into virtual space and because they were separate objects I could twist and place them. This was a great way to test adding elements to an existing design without much effort.

Playing with scale is always interesting thing to do. Here I scaled up a rose and vase in my interior next to my chair.

This is a selection of my work on a cafe chair in VR. This provided great discussion on the final design and showed the design path.

Original in black on the pedestal and 4 different versions around it. After an initial meeting it only took about 40minutes to modify my original geometry and bring them into virtual space. This was a fantastic turn around time to bing the ideas back to full scale. The initial evaluation was done in VR and then the alternatives were suggested and mocked up. Having a reference made small changes from the other models  very clear and easy to understand. With limited time frame doing full scale mock-ups of so many different versions would not have been possible. 

I brought in a large file into TiltBrush and it loaded but dropped a bunch of polygons. I didn’t take the time to see how big was too big. This was 138MB for reference. 

Bringing in a person helps with scale of furniture objects also. 

It turns out that sitting helps with understnding scale when you don’t have your body as reference. I match a real chair to a virtual chair (then circle it in red so I don’t sit in the wrong chair). This is a great way to understand furniture objects.

In a quest for a generic interior crit space using Unity I created a room and started playing with dynamic lighting. My intention was to position lights, turn them on and off in realtime. The hope was to bring in digital objects to this space to create a higher fidelity space to evaluate objects. I ran into trouble with the free version of Unity not wanting dynamic lighting in realtime. It also appeared to be more trouble than it was worth at this point but something worth exploring further. 

What the world would look like if you were a dog, a short person at a concert, a child, anyone else. When I brought in another ID professor he was very interested in the ability to place you in the shoes of others. We talked about how we always filter opportunities (problems) through our own perception. Self bias. Using VR we can change the scale of the world around us, place ourselves in a specific location, or even change our species. This idea of creating better awareness was something really interesting to think about. One of the main problems we discussed as a designer is understanding peoples problems. VR as a tool for creating empathy could be very powerful.

I was able to show the Head of Industrial Design and he instantly took to drawing in 3D like a duck to water. He said this is how thought anyway and worked in the space naturally. We spoke a lot about use in object design but also the opportunity for UI and UX specifically for VR and AR (augmented reality). He was really interested in how many different ways VR could be explored and the breadth us uses. Architecture ,interior architecture, and landscape architecture seemed like a natural choice as well as object and UX but he was also very interested in how students with an open prompt might use it. He thought there very easily could be a studio that could give an open prompt to explore different interest and see what would happen. Also interested in seeing how it could be used as part of the NASA Habitat studio could use it.