The first stage of this project was a session run by Reality Next, where students formed skits around principles of the carbon cycle. They got into motion captures suits and acted out their stories. Afterwards, I was given the animation data and narrative audio files.

1. Asset Hunting: The students’ stories called for a diverse set of worlds- race track, graveyard, forest, and underwater. I grabbed what I had, and filled in any gaps to make creating these worlds quick.
2. Creating Environments: I built out the environments, keeping in mind the props that would be needed.
3. Remapping characters: I had the animation data, but it was just stick figures. I had to re-target everything to different models. The most challenging was getting the motion of two students into chipmunk models.
4. Lining up audio: I had to make sure that the narrative played in line with what the characters were doing.
5. Sub animation: Using Cinemachine in Unity, I added in various lighting & particle effects to bring the stories to life.
6. Building a quiz framework: At the end of each skit, I created a quiz box popup with a timer. I also created a hub world (classroom in space), and kept track of the answers across the five skits. If the user went through and got everything right, they were sent to the end.
7. Presentation: Once I completed the experience, the students were invited to a VR Arcade where they ran through my experience. This was amazing to experience, and I saw students dancing with the easter egg dancing pirate that I hid in the experience.

This project was a huge challenge. I was at the mercy of the student’s stories, and had to visually represent them with characters. This was the first time I had ever used motion capture data, so it was interesting seeing the real motions of the students translated to the virtual world. Building the quiz framework was a great organizational lesson too.