Date Range: 03/06/2019 - 03/12/2019
Total Hours Spent: 13
Overview
This week's update will be a little shorter again but in this case it's the quality rather than the quantity that counts. The last week, surprise, was a brutal slog trying to get assignments done in other classes which limited my time spent working on this project exclusively to our work periods in class. That being said, I stuck around for an extra work period this week to finish up work, FINALLY, on implementing reliable grab mechanics into the VR user experience.
Challenges & Successes
I feel like if I read back my blog posts over the last month I would be reading about my struggles with getting user-object interaction up and running. It's been a frustrating but enlightening learning experience that has helped me gain a better understanding of both A-Frame itself and Javascript as a whole. As you'll see in the video below, I have come to an end point, for now, in my long winded journey with figuring out how let a user grab an object in our virtual space. The concept seemed so simple at first but got more and more complicated as I continued to spend time with it.
Ultimately, it turns out that our awesome physics system doesn't exactly play nice when you try re-parenting elements between nodes and causes fatal errors to occur when trying to do so. I even reached out to the A-Frame mastermind himself, Don McCurdy, who confirmed my suspicions that opting for a simulated parenting system as opposed to the real deal would be the best option (for now - I still want to figure our how to parent physical objects). So, whether it's for good or just for now, our project will be managing object interaction and manipulation with constraints instead of parenting. It's a decent alternative that I could have had working weeks ago - the fact of how true this is makes the whole thing a little frustrating - but there are a few draw backs that I would like to look into working around before we put Kendo Gakko to bed.
Next Steps
Our beta presentation is at the end of this week means some last minute work has to get done so our team can pull together a cohesive demo in time for Friday. Unfortunately we've had to continue reevaluating the scope of our project and have cut down our original idea of having 3 difficulty levels to just one. This semester has been nothing if not a struggle so we continue to adapt and progress how we can with the time that we have; I'm confident our team will be able to produce something to be proud in the end, we kind of already have.
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