Announcements

• While you’re waiting for class to begin: check out the Physics Playground page and video
• Reminder: Policy on project lateness. Turning in a project late is better than not turning it in at all!
• Audre Lorde
  • Today after class: Self-Care as Political Warfare event (Zoom link here), looking at Lorde’s poetry/essays on cancer
  • Notes from a Trip to Russia
• If you’re interested in documentary VR, Journalism 360 might be a useful resource (see their most recent newsletter, which mentions CUNY)
• manual: HDRI Lighting in Maya (2016)

Agenda

• 3:10 
  • Unity
    • Tour of Unity Hub and Learn.Unity.com. Since this is 3DVE, we will focus on Physics!
    • Note on coding
    • Creating a Physics Playground: We will build on this environmental project with models and objects we previously made/used in Maya. Steps to set the project up:
      1. Create a new Unity project. I recommend calling it something descriptive like Physics_Test01.
      2. In the Package Manager, import and activate Cinemachine, which is used by this project.
      3. Close the new project.
      4. Download the Physics Playground files (linked from the Overview page).
      5. From the Physics Playground directory, drag the contents of each subdirectory into the corresponding subdirectory of your project.
      6. When you reopen the project, you should see the Physics Playground.
      7. Today, we will use this project to look at the Unity UI, project components, and environment. We might also use the Unity manual.
  • [Brief break for DMs]
  • While you’re going through the steps above, I’ll discuss MeshLab + Molecule Data. Note Prof’s Youtube playlist on Coronavirus vaccines (all videos are from respected journals, medical orgs and news outlets).
  • Physics Playground Project Anatomy
    • Uses the Creator Kit: FPS in a very strange way!
    • Skybox update
    • Collider update
  • Quick Technique Updates
    • Wrapping texture around a sphere
• 4:50 Break 
• 5:00 
  • “WandaVision Is The Matrix From the Machines’ Perspective” (Slate) 
  •  Part II of Semiology of Graphics
  • Blockchain Explainers
    • Article about Beeple artwork sale (WaPo, shared by Franky)
    • ACM Article (more technical, by CS folks)
    • WIRED 5-level explainer video (bigger-picture, by humanities folks). Note this section about “hype.”
    • Blockchains Use Massive Amounts of Energy—But There’s a Plan to Fix That (short article from MIT Tech Review)
    • For those of you who use Git and Github, the blockchain “distributed ledger” concept is similar to concepts of distributed version control.

Assignments

• Technical Stuff: 
  • If you still owe me Projects 2 and/or 3, start thinking about doing additional extra credit.
  • Please finish importing the Physics Playground and play around with the project.
    • Go through the videos/pages for the Overview, Workshop 1, Workshop 2 (Time), and Workshop 3 (Sound).
    • Before class next week, take a screenshot of your Physics Playground in action. I’ll ask you to add your screenshot into this slideshow during next week’s class.
• Conceptual Stuff
  • Please read Part III of Semiology of Graphics. Again, the text is dense, but the graphics are numerous and organized.

Announcements: Extra Credit

• Go through any/all of the non-playground tutorials in the Physics Playground series (the non-playground tutorials start at “Intro to the Unity Physics Engine 2019“) and send prof 3+ paragraphs or other documentation (pics, video, etc) about the process.
• Check the Projects + Extra Credit page for more EC options. If any of your projects are late, I strongly encourage you to submit extra credit work.