First of all, unity is beyond cool. To be able to create a virtual world in which you can enter is sweet. However, I don’t know if surprised is the right word, but I was surprised to find out that a lot of the virtual world is pre-made. When Ben initially showed us the virtual nature world (natureprefab2 or something) a couple of weeks back, I was under the impression that he created the entire world himself. Now while I don’t want to have to go through all of the work of making each individual tree and building, loading a bunch of prefabs into the world seems a bit like cheating to me for some reason. I realize that this is necessary not only for our timeline and skill set, but also for our sanity, yet something about it seems wrong. Nonetheless, unity seems ridiculously fun (albeit challenging) and I am excited to use it. I am glad my group is not doing the Wizard of Oz for the final project because seeing the movie affects my ideas of the world and what I would be able to accomplish within Unity. Doing a scene from a story with which I have never seen the scene seems more fun because I will have had no preexisting notions about if my scene is realistic or not.
I thought the same thing when Ben showed us the nature2 world it was like someone telling me Santa wasn’t real all over again. While I am sure Unity and the world building is very challenging still, I too had Ben placed on a pedestal for creating this awesome world! I am also a little relieved though because now my group can really focus on creating an experience rather than just the objects. With the help of importing objects into Unity, we can actively balance the setting/objects with the movements.
I third (?) that opinion– I felt a bit let down by all of the prefabs. But, when you think about it (this is something I note in my own post), writers who create alternate realities, or just worlds entirely different from ours, have access to the “real” world when creating their new environments. So, essentially everyone uses “prefabs,” of a sort, when creating virtual realities. VR is more about the experience and the interaction as opposed to the creation.
Eh. Honestly I wasn’t all that surprised or let down. Ben’s a smart guy, who does good work, but the creation and modelling of dedicated, detailed graphical objects and environments is something people take years of classes worth to perfect. I could definitely buy him being able to model a darn good tree, or thing of grass, or any other singular object, or maybe even a few, but every single asset he showed us? A dedicated and fully trained modeler who can do all of that is either an indy developer or part of the industry ninety nine percent of the time. And as somebody who knows a person who specializes in 3D modeling, and has seen the amount of work and effort they put it into it? Yeah, there was no way we were doing all of that, not unless literally the entire course was just creating the VR sim, and even then there’d still definitely be at least some prefab use. A bit disappointing if you go in blind about just how much work that would actually be, since it is a wonderfully creative process, but honestly, we should consider ourselves blessed by the massive pre-fab library available to us.
What might be most interesting about the entire idea of prefabrication is that it draws into question “Who is the ultimate creator?” in Virtual Reality. This might even be a spooky question, because we as the “Creators” of our world give up a little agency when we use materials that have already been created for us. I don’t necessarily think this is that bad – but it does make me question how much we are creating. On the other hand it might not matter too much. I wasn’t that shook by the prefabricated material. It would be hard to believe that Ben was out there simply creating bespoken trees and bushes from scratch. I think the reason why I wasn’t that bugged by this is that currently I am unable to create trees, so the ability to have an entire world at our disposal got me very excited.