Fall 2012: Thesis Recap & Moving Forward
Over the past several months I have been hard at works in making significant technical strides on my thesis in attempting to solve the challenge of Virtual Cinematography beyond big studio production environments. Through my exploration, I spent the summer working primarily on the iPad development, exploring the capabilities of the tablet within the game engine Unity.
Take a look at my presentation overviewing the progress I made in User Interface Design and building a Networking Infrastructure.
User Interface Development
Leveraging third-party packages and tools built within the Unity Mobile infrastructure, I have developed a functional proof-of-concept demonstrating some of the skills I have developed running natively on an iPad. The demo below consists me demonstrating features of the mobile Virtual Camera System including touch regions, touch-drag, pinch-to-zoom, mini-map + tap-to-warp, basic help system, and camera record/playback functionality.
Networking Infrastructure
A key exploration was to demonstrate that it was possible to stream data in real-time from an iPad and a desktop station. I wanted to prove that position information of objects in the environment can be manipulated & transferred across a local network. While there are some limitations on the mobile network transfer data cap, I was able to demonstrate a simple demonstration of object manipulations also running natively on both my iPad and laptop across a private network.
To Infinity and Beyond
The core focus of the upcoming months is to flesh out my thesis proposal for approval by my committee. I am working closely with Professor Paul Diefenbach, Ph.D, head of the Graduate Digital Media & Game Design program here at Drexel University, as my primary thesis advisor. Professor Diefenbach will be a great aspect in helping me push my system and will be a great asset due to his professional expertise in game development and interface design. I look forward to priming my research proposal while also making strides on finalizing & focussing my project design.
Stay tuned to the PRODUCTION tab of my blog (or search for the “thesis” tag) for the latest updates on my thesis development.
Keep Calm and Thesis On :]
