UPDATE
A few days before our final capstone project, my laptop got damaged. Unfortunately, I couldn’t fix it before the program ended. I really wanted to build different XR projects but life has other plans I guess. It’s 7 March 2023 and I still haven’t gotten my laptop back. I am hoping for the best.
A couple of weeks ago, on a Whatsapp group, someone shared a link to the AR/VR (Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality) Hackathon. One thing that caught my attention was the pre-hackathon training. I have always been fascinated by AR/VR and last year I spent time on YouTube watching videos and asking myself “how did they do this?”. I searched for tutorials but it all seemed complicated to me.
I saw this as a perfect opportunity to learn and I quickly signed up and joined their Discord server. I have lots of ideas and I have always thought AR/VR will be perfect for them.
It’s a 10-week training program and we are currently in week 7.
I won’t lie, keeping up with all 4 courses hasn’t been easy. In fact, I originally signed up for 5 but I decided to let one go. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I have 4 classes 🥲 while Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have only 1 class. I motivate myself by saying “it’s just 10 weeks, you’ll be done soon”.
Courses are:
- Spacial Design and Interaction for building RT-3D WebVR
- Introduction to Augmented Reality
- AR/VR Development using Unity
- Learn VR Design and Development for Building VR Apps, Experiences, and Games with Unity
Introduction to Spark AR
I have learned how to:
- Create 3D avatars and add animation to them
- Export models from Blender to Unity
- Create shaders in Unity
- Visual scripting in Unity
- Spatial Sound in Unity (I loved the masterclass we had on this)
- Create image targets using Vuforia
So far it’s been great – being familiar with coding and Unity, makes it easy for me to catch up when I miss classes.
Super grateful for this opportunity and thankful to the organizers. I never take free programs for granted.
Once I’m done with this, I’ll try my best to stay away from training programs and spend more time building projects but I know this is a lie – I’ll sign up for another one again 😎
