Hello VR friends! In a previous post, I went over a few tips for preparing a scene to be used in VR. In this post, I will be using that scene to demonstrate my core VR development package called PuppetJump. I will go over what makes PuppetJump unique to other VR starter packages and demonstrate […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part Nine – A Second Screen
This project has been a great one for me because it has given me the opportunity to get familiar with multiple new technologies that I have never used before including the Microsoft Kinect 2.0 for Windows and the Microsoft Speech API. But, apparently, I didn’t want to stop there. Awhile ago, after playing with Nintendo’s Wii […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part Eight – The Attention System
In part seven of this series I talked about how empathy for the students plays a key role in the philosophy behind this application. By that, I primarily meant that the user must continually monitoring the students’ actions and behaviors in order to try and estimate why, or why not, they might be paying attention at any […]
Content over Immersion: Using Kinect instead of a VR headset and how it worked better for us
In this post, I will describe a virtual reality teaching simulator that I am working on and why we chose to put a hold on our plans to develop for a VR headset, like the Oculus Rift, and opted to use Microsoft’s Kinect instead. Although this example is specifically for a teaching simulation, there are many […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part Seven – Focus and Empathy
You might notice in the screen shots for this post that I started roughing in the walls and floor of the classroom itself. I put some windows to the student’s left and have some dynamic sunlight coming through. I also added a dynamic ceiling light. Not totally sure what to do with the walls at […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part Six – Variety, Seeing and Viability
Up until now, I have been using a single character to test and make demos with. I did, however, duplicate that character and give him two different names for testing purposes. This was done to save time initially. I wanted to start laying down a foundation of functionality before charging head strong into creating additional art […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part Five – Moving in Space
After experimenting with voice commands using the Kinect, the next thing I wanted to experiment with was tracking the users movement. Using Rumen’s examples I was quickly able to start recognizing all the joints of the body that Kinect is able to track. Kinect can capture positional and rotational data of a user’s center of hips, spine, […]
Tech to Teach the Teacher: Part Four – Kinect with Voice
I mentioned in the first post of this series that our initial intentions were to make a teaching simulator using virtual reality; focusing on the Oculus Rift. I also mentioned that given the early stages of that technology, and the immediate and obvious difficulties with it, we decided to put that part of our plan […]