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.

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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:

1. Spacial Design and Interaction for building RT-3D WebVR
2. Introduction to Augmented Reality
3. AR/VR Development using Unity
4. Learn VR Design and Development for Building VR Apps, Experiences, and Games with Unity
5. Introduction to Spark AR

I have learned how to:

1. Create 3D avatars and add animation to them
2. Export models from Blender to Unity
3. Create shaders in Unity
4. Visual scripting in Unity
5. Spatial Sound in Unity (I loved the masterclass we had on this)
6. 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 😎