WANDERER
(sound on)
Spring 2024
Unity Engine - PhD Research (contribution)
Wanderer is a real-time "non-interactive" application. Non-Interactivity refers to the application's nature - it is meant to react to human presence, without the user actively participating in the application's runtime. This means that objects will react to face detection, sound levels, and real-time weather, all without the intentional input of a player. It is a speculative design project that prioritizes ecological balance over human interaction, and displays this balance via augmented realty sensors.
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I was responsible for managing the project Github, programming species interactions as well as AR/VR components, and implementing 3D assets into the engine.
APIs and Real Time Data:
Wanderer utilizes the Open Weather API to reflect real time weather data for the city of Dallas, Texas, into the application. Every five minutes, Wanderer makes a call to Open Weather to retrieve the temperature, current weather description, and amount of precipitation in the area. A set of enums and bools communicates with the call data to change the setting of the app. These managers also retrieve the system time and date in order to change the time of day within the app.
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Reactionary Fish: ​
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Each species of fish is given a class, which has a set of preferences - temperature, water level, human presence. Each of these preferences are kept within their class structure, and a set of enums determine what action fish should take.
Part 3: Text to Speech (TTS) and audio feedback.
Now that the previous two sections have been executed, the player will need to know where they are, and what's happened. The node Play Sound at Location provides auditory feedback that the event has been triggered. Then, a channel is added during the activation sequence, which is plugged into Speak On Channel. Attached to this is a sequence of strings and variables, which when appended together will provide information on the waypoint such as its distance to the player, and which waypoint the player is looking at.
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BLUEPRINTS
Wanderer utilizes several scripts and code processes to make the application run properly A few key features, highlighted to the side, include:
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- Real Time Weather Data and System Date/Time
-Reactionary Classes
-AR/VR sensors (Face and Sound Detection)