alice-teacher Final Alice VR Demo Video and Lessons Learned

[Eric Brown]

Hey All,

First let me say how excited I am to see you all start to explore the use of the Alice Player and Alice in VR.  We were very excited about this new functionality and the timing of its release just as learning went remote and access to hardware for students was more challenging was unfortunate.  I can’t wait to see what the students come up with.  I wanted to chime in on a couple of the different conversations and questions recently raised:

1.  Alice and the quest - I have tested with my quest and the link cord and successfully ran worlds in the headset using the Alice desktop player (I have a quest 1 so assume it will work for the 2 but if anyone does in fact truly validate that we would love to hear).  We do have designs for other ways to do this in the future including enabling students to create their own apks and side load them into the quest (or even in a browser in the headset) and longer term a published Alice app and web portal to allow students to upload their worlds and then download them into the quest app.  We will definitely update on these projects as we explore the best paths forward to support stand alone VR like the quest.

2.  Bill this analogy of seeing behind the set is a good one and definitely exposes the issues related to designing (or porting your existing world) for 360 and for a world where you can’t control the players view (or shouldn’t because programming camera moves and forcing the player's view can be jarring in VR).  We will take a look at our Alice VR lesson and add more specific content related to this issue.  If you haven’t taken a look at the VR lesson you can view it here:

http://www.alice.org/resources/lessons/design-process-virtual-reality/

As you all start to work more in this space we welcome feedback on things that would be helpful to students so that we can add them top the lesson.

3.  As Bill has found there are differences in how the Alice Player runs and the player in the Alice IDE.  Definitely let us know and share any worlds that break in this transition.  In most cases we have found that the Unity player actually functions better and smoother than the Alice IDE and has enabled us to improve the graphics (such as adding shadows etc).  Again as more of you explore the player and the VR don’t hesitate to share issues and worlds.  In many cases we can only QA so much and students will code patterns and projects that we didn’t even imagine for testing.  We also have new designs for both the Alice IDE interface and player controls (vr preview) in the unity player that will make the desktop testing of worlds designed for VR easier.  Students will then have more flexibility to test on the desktop before moving to the headset (things like more visual references to the camera and vr space in the scene editor to separate key inputs to allow camera turns in the player when previewing VR).  Again we will definitely let you all know as we move these improvements forward and please let us know if there are specific functionalities that your students are craving or issues they are facing when building for VR.

Very Exciting!

Sincerely,

Eric

PS We liked and retweeted you Bill!  Thank you so much for sharing out your great work so that hopefully others can find and use Alice!


> On Nov 30, 2021, at 9:25 AM, Barnum, William via alice-teachers <alice-teachers at lists.andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hey all,
> 
> Thanks so much for the feedback on the draft video of the Alice VR program demos!
> 
> I wanted to share a few things I learned from my experience:
> 
> 1. When I first imported a student project into VR, I was disappointed. It seemed less realistic.  One student had created a neat narrative that depended on tight camera angles that focused on only what she wanted the viewer to see. It ruined the illusion when I could swivel my head to control the view because it didn't look right from different angles. It was kind of like if your favorite TV show turned the camera 5 degrees, and you could see the wood holding up the fake walls to the fake room. I realized that we needed to consider all possible camera angles when designing worlds.
> 
> 2. The Alice Unity player doesn't work exactly the same as the desktop Alice player. In some cases, sloppy or processor-intensive code which didn't cause problems on the desktop player caused issues with the Unity player. I didn't realize that until students tried out their worlds, and we had to troubleshoot on the fly. Doing it again, I will install the Alice Unity player on each student's desktop and have them try their programs out ahead of time without VR goggles. That way, we can work out the bugs before we try it with the VR headset.
> 
> 3. I've tweeted out the final version of the video. Any likes, comments, or retweets on the tweet would be humbly appreciated. 🙂
> https://twitter.com/Bill_Barnum/status/1465351712386871298?s=20
> 
> Bill
> 
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