Our first group crits for our project so far also provided me with the chance to look at the first visual draft of the VR experience so far. Before we went up and presented what we have at the moment, Ana gave us all the opportunity to walk through the space on a VR headset. At the moment, it’s still quite basic but I’m very impressed with how Ana has managed to model the building so far.

So far the walkthrough allows the player to walk through the entrance of the building up to the lift in the tower block, and then to be transported to a different level of the building (this will eventually become 3 levels). At the moment the level that is available is just an idea of a surrealist landscape, but this will probably change at some point.

Annoyingly, although I had worked on a sonic idea for the experience in preparation for the crit, I didn’t have access to my laptop over the weekend before the session so I couldn’t upload it to the Google Drive for ideas to be presented, due to me moving over the weekend and accidentally leaving my laptop at my old home. The idea I wanted to present was based on a sequenced loop I had worked on at the synth desk in LCC a few weeks ago. I did try to come in early before the crit on the day to recreate what I had made but I wasn’t happy with the result so I decided not to upload it.

Overall, we had mostly good feedback on the sound assets and visual elements of the experience. One thing that was mentioned was that we might want to work more collaboratively on each aspect of the sound design, instead of dividing up roles and only focussing on one element each. This would mean that we all get to learn something about each aspect of the sound design of the experience, whilst also preventing certain aspects of the sound being left to the last minute if the person who is responsible for it doesn’t put enough work in. This is something we have taken on board, and we will try to work more collaboratively with each other when it comes to the foley, music, background ambience etc.

It was also useful to see how the other groups are getting along as we can compare their progress to ours and also take inspiration from the way they are working together.