Oculus Launchpad Experience 0.3
- by Anthony
- in Oculus Launchpad Thoughts WebVR
- posted July 23, 2018
Introduction
A few successes this week. We now have a solid team to work on this project, I was able to get the Janus WebRTC server running on AWS, and interacting with my own social WebVR code thanks to help from the @mozillareality team, and we have found an artist and storyteller willing to help with a content example for this socio-educational platform!
The Team and The Tools
This week I was able to finalize the small team that will be working on this project with me. I looked to my weaknesses in being experienced with modern back-end and front-end development and found two schoolmates willing to help where they can in this respect. I was also able to convince a fellow Professor where I teach to help with 3D content creation – she will be a huge asset. This will allow me to focus on multi-user interactions, project management, and, being the generalist I am, help anywhere additional human-power is required.
I feel that keeping the team small at this point is important so that there is more accountability, and less micromanagement. We are also trying to keep project management tool use minimal as to not provide too much friction between what needs to be done and how each individual chooses to do it. To this end we will be using the following tools and agile development techniques:
- Github for source control
- Github “projects” for our task boards using issues
- Slack for asynchronous communication
- Google Hangouts Meeting every Saturday morning to catch up and talk about any issues in weekly build
- Will aim to have a build every week starting the beginning if August we can pass around to our friends, family, and selected members of the community to provide feedback.
credit: image a capture from the the recreated WebVR experiment by Markus Neuy and Dirk Krause
The Content Problem
The problem with building a platform that can be used for others to share content is that we need to have a solid use-case to example. I recently met with an experienced journalism Professor and colleague that has offered to advise this project and she highly recommended that we tie any story we tell to an individual, as they generally become more powerful that way. To this end she lent me an extremely interesting and powerful book that showcases this wonderfully – “People Who Said No” by Laura Scandiffio, and so I have been reaching out to several people over the past two weeks about creating a socialVR experience about them and their work with limited success.
Fortunately, I have also been meeting for coffee with a new friend a few times over the past few weeks to talk about VR, life, and culture; and after explaining that I am struggling on finding the story to tell he surprised me with the knowledge that is a storyteller and very interested in helping with our project! I hope to share more on his concepts soon; but his ideas for content are wonderfully challenging my thoughts on how this platform should be developed.
Point for diverse perspective! Next, The Fire.
