{"id":88,"date":"2009-12-30T01:53:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-30T01:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mishmashmakers.com\/michelle\/?p=88"},"modified":"2017-02-08T15:03:47","modified_gmt":"2017-02-08T20:03:47","slug":"exploring-maya-and-virtools-caribbean-resort-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mishmashmakers.com\/michelle\/2009\/12\/exploring-maya-and-virtools-caribbean-resort-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring Maya and Virtools, Caribbean Resort Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>In December of 2009, I went with Fraser Anderson<\/a> to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. It was my first time out of North America and on an all-inclusive resort. Needless to say, much fun was had and the sun\u2019s rays were enjoyed very much. I\u2019m from Canada people, we only have summer for 4 months. While at our resort, the Baha Principe, I noticed that all of the buildings and architecture was uniform and the layout of the resort would make a wonderful setting for a spatial navigation experiment (I know I am nerdy thinking about these things on vacation).Once I got back to Edmonton, the winter semester was starting (at the time I was in the MSc program) and I was scheduled to take an independent study course with Dr. Walter F. Bischof<\/a>. The purpose of this course was for me to explore virtual reality software and the difficulties inherent in creating virtual environments for psychological applications.<\/a>\n

As my final project, I worked with Maya (3D modelling software) as well Virtools (a virtual reality behavior and deployment suite). One of my final deliverables for the course was a 3-D Caribbean virtual resort.\u00a0 I based the layout and architectural elements in the 3-D world after the resort that I had been to in the Dominican Republic. While the resort may seem like a toy or trivial environment, I designed following many of the principles that are used to design navigation and way-finding studies and also added in support to gather user metrics (which are used to facilitate understanding about human way-finding behavior).<\/p>\n

Although the 3-D models might not be the greatest, I was quite happy with the end result. My virtual resort is rather large, with lots of Carribean-ish items and can be viewed on a monitor, HMD, or in a CAVE. As it requires the Virtools software for deployment, the pictures below gives a brief look at the resort. You can also see the 19MB video on YouTube here<\/a> or below:<\/p>\n