I think I’ll have a far more accurate production timeline once I better assess the availability of completed assets and resources (and permission/conditions for their use) for both the virtual space and its audience. Needless to say, things will go faster if I can use an existing theater model and pre-rigged bodies, for example. This may have to be the case, as animating, programming the audience behaviors and spatial audio (cheers, whoops, applause) seems a little daunting in their own right.

For my project, a more detailed breakdown would appear to be something like this:

March/April

  • Continued research, training on Unreal Engine
  • Asset acquisition/construction
  • Animation/AI behavior implementation

May

  • Incorporate audio
  • Design/develop parameter controls
    – Crowd size, excitement, behavior triggers, etc
  • Deployment for user testing
    – What platform? Web-based would be most accessible for testing, but ultimately ported to Oculus/Vive?

June

  • User Testing/Feedback
  • Adding insights/improvements
  • Documentation & presentation

This seems to be the most logical order to approach this. I could easily distribute my remaining time on the calendar evenly, but that’s not very realistic: some phases of development will clearly take longer than others, so some of this will overlap – and of course, that’s not even allowing for unexpected issues that will inevitably pop up. Hopefully I’ll have a grasp of the  viability given the allotted time once I gather the digital assets and start working with them, but there may be some precedents I can use as an indication of what to expect. If not, maybe I can scale down the scope to a smaller “audience” as proof of concept, and keep building on it from there.