I’m currently undertaking a research & development project investigating the use of XR technologies to create an immersive art installation.

I’ve just finished the first 2 week discovery “sprint” as part of my XR Research Project. I’ll be sharing my insights of each sprint on the blog as it’s completed.

The focus for Sprint 2 was to get a basic “hello world” example running on my Oculus Quest. This type of program is normally trivial but it fleshes out correct configuration of the hardware and software environment, laying the foundations for more interesting projects further down the line and getting confidence with the tooling.

I started Sprint 3 keen to build something and revisited the creative coding tutorial in Unity recommended by David Johnston at the beginning of the project. The thing that initially struck me about this tutorial is how it stripped back the Unity ceremony and “complexity”, the latter is actually aimed at simplifying the process for game devs but can be daunting for a new user with so many options available. The focus here is on pixels and a canvas, taking you a little closer to the metal which aligns with previous experience of Open Frameworks and Processing.

I needed to deviate off plan a little in Sprint 4 and spend time researching native audio and DSP in Unity and review solutions for 3D Sound. Ultimately, given the wide range of skills required to create a complete immersive experience of any size, I decided this would be a smart focus for future projects.

BBC Research & Development is the national technical research department of the BBC. It has responsibility for researching and developing advanced and emerging media technologies for the benefit of the corporation, and wider UK and European media industries.