Cygnus

Inspiration

We loved the idea of visiting a landmark using the Looking Glass Portrait and interacting with it with hand controls using the Leap Motion Controller. Keeping these two technologies in mind, we wanted to center our idea on the hackathon's key theme this year, presence. To us, presence is a 3 dimensional concept that is made up of the past, present, and future.

What it does

Cygnus is a virtual experience that immerses people in the personal story of one of our team members, Zelda. By visiting an important place associated with Zelda's root culture, the audience can help Zelda retrieve her memory to see how her past affected the present, and to look into the future. For this hackathon, we built one of the 9 memory fragments represented by the constellation Cygnus.

How we built it

We constructed a workflow between Unity3D, Looking Glass Portrait, and Leap Motion Controller. We applied Looking Glass and Ultraleap plugin for Unity to build out our program. On the design side, we used Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Audition, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Blender. Keeping in mind the characters and limitation of the technology we adopted, we did three rounds of brainstorming and generated some cool ideas.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many compatibility issues with setting up the Looking Glass Portrait and the Leap Motion Controllers together. The Looking Glass 2.0 Alpha release is fresh and exciting, but we found that issues arose when trying to use it with any version of Ultraleap's motion controls. In the end, we used an older, supported version of Looking Glass' software with Leap Motion's up to date software, and we reverted to a stable 2020 release of Unity. Since the Looking Glass is relatively small (close to the size of an iPad mini), we had to make sure all of our models were low poly and optimized to not cause any performance issues. Another challenge we faced is on getting our project to load on multiple computers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of what we produced in the past 2 days of hacking. As we were working with new technology and SDKs, we ran into many issues. We're glad that we tried out new technology and pushed through with it. We are proud to reflect the personal history of one of our team members, Zelda, and to have created this experience that shares an impactful piece of history and culture.

What we learned

Some main takeaways from this experience are the confidence to explore more XR technologies and tools. We gained many new development skills in such a short period of time.

What's next for Cygnus

We hope to build out the story further and add new novel interactions with it! A fun potential route to explore is interaction based on facial recognition with WebXR.