My first task to completing my first assignment is to describe my project's primary methodology, hypothetical vision, scope & limits. Most of the necessary research work had been done in last semester's DES 300 course, so the main challenge now is to refine my proposal's catalogued knowledge into a more professional design proposal, with new additions introduced in DES 301 attached to it. Deciding the format of the board had been… thought-provokingly exhausting, to say the least.

Besides wanting to complete my assignments and graduate, part of me desires to read the life stories of the local Māori, from their psychological patterns to their historical practices. If you know me very well, my psyche tends to wander back into undesirable memories of nihilism, gloomy social isolation, et cetera. This is perhaps proof the Technology stream brief resonated with my human psyche more than I desired. However, now, as a practitioner of neutrality, my hypothetical vision for this project is to provide the downtrodden youths all possible paths to interacting with their psychological sources of depression. I desire to provide compelling options; not forced choices regardless of altruism.

Not a lot of progress for the first week overall but at least the foundations have been set for the overall tone of my project.

After a reflective meeting with Ms. Mairi, I have finally decided to change my project's target audience to one more familiar to me - depressed introverts.

The specific category I will be focusing on depression? Mixed anxiety-depression disorder (MADD). It is a narrowly known category of depression that was officially documented in the 4th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but it was not included in the 5th edition since its original symptoms list was deemed too unreliable. This further justifies my design method of IDEO's human-centered design; it allows me to keep in continuous contact with my target audience and a more individualistic understanding of their symptoms & their apparent causes.

I believe MADD is a rational focus for VR digital therapeutics with my new target audience. Us introverts' reflective practices tend to make us variably self-conscious, sometimes to heights of sheer anxiety. Massive quantities of anxiety can cause high scores for neuroticism, a mental trait that can make individuals more likely than average to be moody and to experience such feelings as negative ones, which are key factors to the development of both anxiety and depression disorders.

Additionally, this category resonates with me the most since I can develop pretty intense emotions of anxiety during serious work, allowing me to sympathize with their plights more and find possible methods to assist with their depression management. We get to scratch each other's itchy backs more likely this way.

Overall, sufficient progress has been made for this project since most of project criteria & possible mandatory tasks have been documented, and a primary VR digital therapeutics technology has been selected for developing a key solution for my target audience.

This will be the last week of my project's Inspiration phase. Time moved faster than I had preferred, but by now, all my project parameters should have been properly decided and described on Miro.

Main progress for this week is from scope setting and prototyping preparations. My methods to prototyping the project solution will mainly use Unreal Engine 5's VR template since it looks easier to use than Unity and I took break time learning how to use it. This could also be an opportunity to improve my Blender 3D modeling skills as well. Once the key assets have been decided and refined, they will be imported into VRChat for official prototyping.

Speaking of prototyping, my primary technological solution for introverted MADD patients will be a private VR therapy space with, additionally, patient-adjustable aesthetics and locally pre-built behavioral activation treatment tools.

I also added a mood board after this week's stream meeting. Four separate board subcategories - two for aesthetics, one for architectural layout, and one for digital interface - had been classified for easier readability.

The start of the Ideation phase had been rougher than imagined, having recently completed my future plans presentation and beginning interactions with intended software for VR therapy room development.

First topic for this week: possible future suggestions from Ms. Mairi. She has recommended the stream to seek an audience with Empathic Computing Lab for professional insights on solution development. Class-wide discussions raised brought application misconceptions to the table, which required our tutor to communicate with DES 302 supervisors for further clarification on permittable questioning actions.

With the former out of my way for now, I still have another issue: lack of specificity for questioning. It is hard to pinpoint one direction for smooth communicative practices with the Lab about my VRChat therapy room project, whether it is on the topic of VR development, a more intimate perspective on MADD, or past experiences with depressed introverts. The last one is the most frustratingly complicated aspect of this project since ethics approval for direct interviewing is rejected for safety concerns.

Second topic for this week: interactions with Unreal Engine 5 will be discontinued in favor of Unity. The former game engine is incompatible with the comparably older software of VRChat; my primary VR software can only import assets from Unity 2019 edition (one of its older engines). Luckily, I have found a solidly popular tutorial series for VRChat asset creation & importing, ensuring my progress is smoother than my worst-case scenario.

For the rest of my Ideation process, as much as it makes me undesirably anxious, I am bound to have several gray areas in my solution due to method limitations. The seemingly practical solution for this phase is to simply minimize the radii of these gray areas via communication with tutors, stream peers, and secondary research.

It has been a long while since I picked up a pen and sketched something. Oddly nostalgic yet bitter feeling as it reminds me how much I have disregarded my potential and descended to fatalistic sloth. Well, at least my hands are moving to write this blog, so this week has not been a huge loss for me.

Anyhow, my major tasks this week are quick storyboarding, persona creation to broadly compensate for zero ethics approval & live interviewing, rough sketching processes for my VRChat environment, local interface, and local digital avatar skins.

Storyboarding

Personas

Inspired by a classmate's approach to persona creation, I decided to make a persona from my own experiences with anxiety & depression (more like apathy) and the usually reliable ChatGPT. This method could introduce me to different lenses more effectively and with less personal biases without external interactions.

Rough sketches

I kept my feedback group to my own stream for the sake of efficiency and casual feedback. That and everyone else seemed way busier with their more complex stream contents. Disappointingly, to myself and my audience, my difficulty with opening up to unfamiliar individuals got me feedback from only a handful of stream-mates whose names will be omitted for concerns of confidentiality.

About the feedback I got from my stream-mates, they so far indicated that:

• My 'Office Chat' and 'Dreamsailer' room designs are the most appealing. The former for its serious-toned professionalism and welcoming hearth; the latter gave users the "illusion of exploration".

• The 'Tabs for Days' and 'Interweaved Thoughts' to be the most practical and user-friendly. The former for its straightforwardness that respects its users' times; the latter for its illusive overtone that invokes dreamy relaxation.

• The 'Boiler Drone' and 'Smilin' Slime' for their cartoonish yet grounded designs. The former for its quirky body part disproportions; the latter for its cutesy and heartwarmingly silly gelatine form.

Up next is expanding upon each rough sketch mentioned above, provide perspective or state view sketches for each, then do a final expansion-refinement for 1 of the 2 most favored sketches. All of this will show my thought process for VRChat asset design before actually learning to make them digitally.

Out of stream-mate Miro progress cross-comparison envy and a desire for huge self-improvement, I wanted to wrap up my ideation phase by the end of this week. Having a solid product idea backed up with relevant scholarly research & public expressions helped immensely with deciding a solution that also resonated with my ideals.

Environment

Further expanding upon my open space sketch for 'The Dreamsailer', final name 'The Dreamhull', I added ideal textures to its foundations (floor, hull, sail) and fleshed out the interactive asset layout (activity table, interface). Pale wood with a cartoonish tint patterned with natural wood grain is a relaxing sight for me. They remind me of my distant relatives' homes that used to have many hand-carved tree trunk, stronger brown furniture. This texture should do nicely with the ship surface and furniture.

This final sketch is partially supported by research on outdoor therapy. Even if scholarly umbrella reviews could not - with sufficient certainty - pinpoint the roles nature can have on therapy patients, the idea alone provides credit to having open space elements in my VR room, even a clear illusion of it.

Interface

Both my stream-mates' comments and an art psychology research paper provided me insights on how curved lines & shapes invoked gentler & quieter emotions within us in contrast to the more agitating & hardcore emotions angular lines can stimulate in people who can rock (musically). I do not believe MADD patients need more agitation than their anxiety symptoms are generating for them. With this information and symbolic association of clouds with the unconscious in mind, I continued developing my draft for the 'Interweaved Dreams' interface.

Made with the minimal-word icon-based UI/UX practice in mind, 'Interweaved Imaginations' hides everything from the all-presenting 'All Here at Once' template into a 3D asset when not used. Interaction with the asset - let us call it a helper in this case - opens up the environmental settings for my VRChat room. The UI design mainly aims to save space and prevent frustrating environment concealment by interface. As for UX, the puffy cloud aesthetic is meant to help MADD patients relax more. That they can have greater clarity of the mind by briefly enjoying the interface.

Digital avatar

Silly robot or slime golem? One of my reviewers thought 'Boiler Bot' provided a less unnatural sight than 'Silly Slime the 2nd'. They thought familiar shapes (and things in general) makes socialization less tense and more probable. Nothing scholarly suggests this is the case for everyone, but if I ever had to have a chat with a towering, transparent humanoid of animated gelatine, my body would naturally tense up regardless of its cute appearance. Actually, its cute looks might make things even more tense!

My final verdict for choosing to refine 'Boiler Bot' to 'Boilbot Body' is acknowledging the minimal rigidity in its design compared to 'Silly Slime the 2nd', based on a shape psychology blog, square or rectangular-looking shapes invoke feelings of trust, security, and reliability within viewers, concepts that can be very helpful with influencing depressed introverts (with MADD or not) to share their internal matters with external sources.

Ideation process

I recognize my current approach to VR asset ideation process is not rich in the person & research aspects, as my foci for the last 2 weeks had been in design diversity and hasty refinement process for rapid progression into the Implementation phase. By keeping the critic audience small and to my own tech stream, I had unnecessarily forsaken valuable opportunities for peer feedback outside of my small social circle plus tutor feedback from Ms. Mairi. To compensate for my shortcomings, I will shortly begin Unity training for VRChat implementation and Blender asset creation.

And probably compare less of my unique work with others based on tutor criticism. Hard-wired introvert habits can never be curbed entirely.

Reading through the official VRChat Unity Creator Companion guides & tutorial series, it surprises me how outdated the software is compared to the hotshot development tools my classmates have been using. Despite remaining in 2019, at least setting up the foundations took relatively little time than I expected. At least it did me a favor of keeping the frustrations list short.

Speaking of my frustrations list, imagine my irritation when I discovered that VRChat… has a trust system that prohibits users from uploading custom content until they have played and socialized enough. Worst of all, no player, not even VRChat's most trusted users aka the oldest of publisher-players, knows the exact numbers needed for ranking up. The system is said to be very fluid with its requirements; a 10-hour player could ascend their visitor rank (lowest newcomer rank) faster than a 100-hour player. Disappointing.

With my laments out of the way, I know I can still focus on what I CAN do: create the assets for my room on Unity. The VRChat creation software luckily has a live-testing function for playtesting with owned avatars on my device. Next time I return to university, this could provide a valuable user testing experience for each of us, including a stream-mate of mine also working with Unity.

And to think it took me this long to touch wonderous VR. Could have had something to do with it disorienting my eyes. And nudging my glasses.

This week showed far more tangible results than my last one.  With my life's more immediate tasks out of the way, I did my best to pressure my lazy self to finish my work. Working small pieces every day proved far healthier for my heart than completing everything before the last few days.

At the topic of Unity, the ProBuilder asset creation add-on looked uniquely intriguing to learn. Leaving Blender to the sides until avatar creation, I gave this mentioned add-on a try. Was it fun? No. ProBuidler allowed me to mold Blender-wise modeling while doing live playtesting, but it heavily punishes geometry extrusions since it forbids simplistic vertex (those edges of 3D shapes) deletion with a click of a simple button. Then again, had I done asset development on Blender, it would have complicated individual asset scaling and playtesting. No matter the method, VR development is currently at a Morton's fork, a false dilemma where both paths lead to roughly equal results of working frustration.

On a more optimistic note, I found a website containing copyright-free texture maps for my project. No need to worry about texture manfacturing. Within a week or two, my room should be complete for presentable user testing. Self-testing at the moment raised concerns for the ship size. For a hull designed to sail through dreams, it was only 3 to 4 average avatars tall and 2 avatars wide. A pitiful size for a ship; one in need of larger scaling.

Regaining my working vigor after my 2-week break was a tormenting trial, but fear of multi-audience disappointment kicked my heavy hands and belligerent brain back into action.

Compared to my pre-break research weeks, most of my foci was placed in co-designing my project's VR room, digital avatar, and exclusive interface development. With help from a remote desktop access Google add-on, I was able to share as much of my current content to my stream-mates. Still, with so much of it still works of progress, no valuable co-design insights could be obtained. At least, compared to everyone else, digital avatar control setup is a null concern as VRChat has already solved that past dilemma. Glad that app has always been free to be downloaded and played on by a variety of VR headsets, specifically the university's precious bundle of Meta Quest headsets.

Avatar animation test, Wayne Poon, 15/09/2023

Favoring Blender progress over Unity this week, I finished my digital avatar that will be optionally provided to VR room patients, which you can see up on this rather hazy GIF… until I tested it on my VRChat digital avatar setup. Several issues regarding excessive meshes, poorly imported image textures, and outdated software compatibility issues turned my originally decent mesh into a poorly made toy one can purchase from those Chinese rip-off toy stores back at home.

Avatar import test, Wayne Poon, 16/09/2023

How did my BoilBot Body's metallic yellow become orange after exporting to Unity? What's even worse is how VRChat has been disallowing me to live-test my avatar thanks to its outdated system - particularly for Meta Quest software - being unable to handle my mesh's parameter-exceeeding details. Toying around, I realized its armature aka its skeleton needed building and I did just that!

Now to test the avatar rig…

Avatar movement test in custom VR room, Wayne Poon, 17/09/2023

And look at that: my Boilbot is lying on the floor as if it had no solid bones inside of its digital vessel. Gonna have to find a tutorial during tomorrow and get everything done before the 10th week. Who knows what hidden obstacles will I have to trample over to complete my last year of university?

The more I worked on Unity and work in general, the less intriguing full-time work sounded to me. Do I like to learn? Yes, but effort sours my reward of creation. Then again, the reward of happiness is not the only life goal, although it seems to be the dominant one engrained in the fundamental human psyche.

Avatar piloting in live VRChat, Wayne Poon, 24/09/2023

Experimentations with my digital avatar's mesh and rig this week has yielded fruitful results. Despite the notable appearance quality drop, blaming the humanoid rig, I successfully published an functional avatar demanding moderate processing power from VRChat. Most of it was used to generate the 9 materials on it - red steel, stripes, images, and all that.

Had I gotten more time, expertise or discipline, perhaps my Boilbot Body would have looked shinier and sport custom idle animations than fully borrowing from the provided humanoid mesh. Actually, even if I accomplished the latter, testing with Android (headset) settings would still have had deterred me from the road of ambition. Why? What is a small headset compared to the processor behemoth - a heavy duty personal computer? My mesh is PC-exclusive at the moment; limited time prompted me to move forward with my other assets instead.

A pity I can live with for this project.

Last photographed Dreamhull progress, Wayne Poon, 23/09/2023

In the topic of my high-fidelity VRChat room,  the Dreamhull is missing its sail, propellers, tail, steering wheel, dual table-chair sets, windows, and miscellaneous VRChat prefabs. If my present self cannot even handle this comparatively small workload, the modern workplace will heavily likely crush me with their comparatively high expectations and desires. In case I needed more reason to motivate myself to work.

Every time I thought the difficult parts of my project had truly been dealt with, the cosmos spares no delay to humble me with the factual hammer that half my remaining work had just begun.

C# menu button debugging, Wayne Poon, 29/09/2023

With only less than a month to complete my Dreamhull prototype, it is time to invest… time into the local environment UI Interweaved Dreams. Before the mesh will be made, I must study the mainstream inner mechanisms of every Unity game out there: C# (C Sharp). What started as a straightforward coding session became a debugging fiesta as my creations failed to work as intended. As seen in the GIF above, while I have had moments of triumph, those were soon trumped by obstacles born from my great ignorance towards C#.

Successful conceal menu & sub-menu script, Wayne Poon, 29/09/2023

You should have just scrolled past a GIF showing my recent success with programming my Interweaved Dreams' concealment functions. It took me hours and help from a VRChat veteran content creator to get it all right. There was a plethora of specific errors in my UI that I now deem unimportant to state in this blog, but rest assured, the next time I code, I am following the official website guidelines more thoroughly. But even that solution has holes in its contents; getting a responsive veteran in your topic should help the most.

Besides the prototype, another required medium in my project is video production - an exhibition-appropriate introductory video. Filmography seems easier to make than poster creation, because to be brutally honest, I feel my 2D graphic design skills pale in comparison to my knowledge with other mediums, yet my high school final 2D art Design portfolio was what ironically roped me into Design to begin with.

Storyboard-in-progress template borrowed from DES 233, Wayne Poon, 30/09/2023

Starting from the basics, my Dreamhull VR room is a digital medium for MADD-afflicted introverts to commune with therapists behind specially customized digital avatars. The former get to chat with an external other without full physical exposure or need to travel outdoors. Sounds solid, doesn't it? Except I might have failed in stating an important element of this project: the Dreamhull is meant to be a temporary solution for assisting MADD patients with managing their own anxiety & depressive symptoms.

I have had chats long before this week about the effectiveness of long-distance, technological communications. During high school-to-university Covid lockdown days, my social interactions were at a surprising all-time low. Contrasting the more plentiful and meaningful chats my classmates and I have been having nowadays, plans for my Dreamhull and VRChat to be temporary facilitators of depression management education have been there since this blog's second-week post. If this information truly confused you about my project, I wish to apologize for poorly stating this fact in my past weekly blog sections.

Before I conclude this week's journey, my plans for my video at the moment revolve around the central theme of honest self-discovery, obtaining as much knowledge as possible, and acting with said wealth of knowledge in the most honest and rational state.

As an anxiety-riddled (not crippled) individual heavily drenched in the conceptual sin of sloth, my psyche needs fearful kicks - fear-based work stimulants that push me to work undesirably necessary tasks. The work from this present is done to fuel my future endeavors with hopefully less sloth. Why my dissonant perspective views work as an enjoyment degrader is an entirely speculative matter for another time. Were it not for my stream tutors, part of me would still be swimming though a gravy of self-doubt & suspicion about my script's narrative appropriateness & enticing elements. The external positivity did help proportionately with improving my work attitude.

Storyboard for ReDesign video, Wayne Poon, 06/10/2023

Onto my glorious works! Having done amateur video-making back in Ms. Gabriella's elective of DES 233 last year, I went with a notably more experimental, ambitious filmographic route of multi-medium storytelling. Using a combination of Blender-rendered animation footage, copyrights-free stock footage, and live recorded footage to promote The Dreamhull through visually portraying the idealized therapeutic processes therapists and patients can potentially perform on there. Instead of background music, ambient sound effects of wood creaking and gusty winds will be implemented into the video out of a selfish belief that any music can sabotage the serious tone I desire within the Dreamhull storyboard progression.

I also have several considerations and plans to use AI voice filters to warp my dialogue audio and ensure the voices of the patient and therapist actors - both planned to be played by myself - sound separate. Talking to yourself when expressing ideas sounds wise, but even a lunatic loner such as I carry doubts of making a play by the lonesome is a prestigious production.

Before I could do ANY of the cinema work, for anti-deceptive purposes, plans have been made to directly import my 85% complete Dreamhull layout onto Blender for recording the VR storyboard environments. Thank the creators we have the Internet to give us information on add-ons for cross-platform tinkering!

As the project deadline looms over my zit-riddled forehead, anxiety aches the humping heart, dulls the tasting tongue, and ruffles the hefty head. Writing fanciful prose provides me a relaxing distraction from all the new field of work for this project. Other than that, having a young adult existential crisis and socio-economic discussions with my parents about inflation replaces my work stress with industrial worry.

Complete Interweaved Dreams for The Dreamhull, Wayne Poon, 14/10/2023

For writing my own custom C# scripts, ChatGPT compressed what could have been hours of attempted debugging into minutes of grunt work. Working with cloth physics? Accurate instructions within 10 seconds. Want the doors to teleport players to inaccessible areas? A functional script with educative header notes is provided. Just do not make your demands too complex because they will increase the margin of error for said scripts and solutions. I'll give it a year or two for it to possess encyclopedic knowledge that will rarely fail my programming endeavors.

Now enough about the future of AI. The final assets for the Interweaved Dreams local environment adjustment UI has been completed, marking the total completion of my listed The Dreamhull functions. Although you will need two clicks to toggle the UI on or off every time, since clicking the first dreamer hides it and reveals the hidden other and vice versa, this is a minor performance setback as everything on the UI works as intended. If I still have time, I could lightly overhaul the shared script with help from ChatGPT.

Virtual Pen add-on for The Dreamhull, Wayne Poon, 12/10/2023

VRChat has been around for long enough to nurture a community of Unity programmers that have made some complex assets for open-source enjoyment. One of these complex assets I borrowed are the vertex pen set. It provides several grabbable pens that allow players to illustrate neon lines that hover in mid-air, as well as utility buttons for rapid single pen color erasure and drawing erasers for separate line erasure. Borrowing design decisions and academic research done by another friend in the same tech stream, I thought having art tools on the ship would provide a second option for behavioral activation aboard.

Teleporters to both the starboard and vessel of The Dreamhull, Wayne Poon, 05/10/2023

For the smaller details on this virtual vessel, above this paragraph of text is a GIF demonstrating my teleporter door and cellar door. It would be more flavorful if Unity had a stronger engine to generate larger plots of alpine terrain than this enlarged plane. Other than that, I am still not a fan of making an entire reflective ocean layer below The Dreamhull, as it downgrades the overall fantastic tone of the virtual reality.

Cosmetic helm for The Dreamhull, Wayne Poon, 15/10/2023

Another minor feature is an accessory ship's helm that plays a brief animation when clicked. Simple in idea it might be, reality-wise, this feature wasted me more time to implement than my UI because of importing issues. The bone responsible for animating the helm stubbornly retains its spawn settings (the settings when it was materialized into Unity game area), meaning the shrunken helm would play the animation at its spawn location or scale. I have seen the same tiny thing enlarge itself or teleport under the wooden floor before snapping back to its exact pre-animation state. To say all this debugging grew me a distaste for future video game development is an understatement. Maybe I should stick to storywriting.

Custom pick-up script test with free and borrowed chess set assets, Wayne Poon, 15/10/2023

But wait! There is more!

Before this week of debugging gave me my first grey hairs, making a functional chess set on Unity software was an arduous brain-beater and it is still one of the worst goals I have set for myself for The Dreamhull. This trial of a programming task is a revolting reminder of when ambition would overwhelm ability. But rather than lament my inabilities, perhaps time would be more desirably spent for me to complete 4 or more tasks than 2 to 3 tasks per day. Last time I tried rushing everything days before the deadline, my heart would not stop pounding loudly and tiredly every of those work hours. Never again.

And did I mention having plans on adding a mirror onto The Dreamhull?

Apologies for drowning you with more words this week; I had much more to report and express at these dark times. Get it together, Wayne… Three more weeks and your final trials shall be concluded.

How long has it been since I used a printer? 2 years? Eh, probably some non-integer number around that. Now that mankind has access to tablets, you assume they would stop cutting trees for paper and more for fuel to our worship-worthy power plants. Nope. Whether they do this out of tradition or practicality is none of my concern so long as it does not affect me.

My printed A4 visual summary, Wayne Poon, 29/10/2023

Every time I gaze at a sunset, my brain cannot help but relax as mine eyes tasted the orange hue of the darkening sky. The Dreamhull by default sails across a sunsetting plains, for while testing as an introvert on it, it felt most appropriate in calming the anxious woes of the collective us - us of introversion and anxiety. Being provided a stock image of a sunsetting mountainous plateau cemented my color palette for the rest of my visual summary. Had to darken the lighter orange to make my white texts clearer, though.

Then comes the business of my exhibition video. Due to familial matters, my physical presence cannot attend it, but such matters are no acceptable reason to absent my submission.