Shared Dream Progress Update #1

Guess I’m learning shaders now

In my last blog post I was trying to decide between two different concepts for the final project for my Social VR class at NYU, and I believe the second of those has more potential to become a compelling experience. Delving into different concepts of space, time, and relation to the virtual world the user is navigating through seems to be both a good idea in and of itself in addition to being somewhat referential to these concepts we have discussed thus far in class - so perhaps I’m a little less “on my own” in that regard. 

Ok so shaders are hard

While I’ve been extremely grateful for the bevy of tutorials freely available online, learning shaders is still a fairly large conceptual and technical challenge. It’s not too paradigmatically different than audio programming: you have an output buffer [frame] that you can modify using functions before the final stage of playing [drawing] it to the speakers [screen]. That being said, learning an entirely new language (HLSL) and style of GPU-programming conventions has been nutty. 

But why are you getting into shaders again?

Right. So conceptually, I’m thinking of something like this image here: walking through a space with ‘windows’ into the past. From my Unity experience thus far, I at least understand that shaders are How You Make Visuals Do Stuff, so it seemed like a good place to start! After some conversations with my friends, stencil shaders might specifically be the tool I’m looking for.

The technical approach I’m anticipating is having “separate” scenes with the objects/actors/cameras duplicated between them, with shaders drawing portions of the other Camera’s view like these floating ‘pictures’. There’s also going to be a somewhat demanding amount of design work / asset creation, I’m sure, but I’m (perhaps naively) confident that I’ve got enough current unity knowledge to pull that off.

I know I have quite the challenge ahead of me, so let’s see how it all turns out!