In my ICS 486 class, I was part of Team 1 and together, we created a gallery in virtual reality using the Oculus as our development platform. In order to create these objects, we had to take countless pictures from all angles and put them together in Regard3D to form our photogrammetry objects. In addition to that, we also used Blender to cut out the excess from our 3D recreations in order to get just the object itself. From there, we placed the objects into a gallery as if it was a real gallery for users to view in virtual reality. One notable thing is that in the gallery, users can fly (albeit slowly) as opposed to walking, therefore giving them a more open view of the virtual world.
For this project, the main parts that I worked on were photogrammetry of three of the ten objects and contributing in forming the layout of the gallery. For the photogrammetry part, I created 3D replicas of a vacuum, kendama, and tissue box. The experience itself was very frustrating as many pictures were needed and the design would not always come out neat so multiple retries were needed. In addition to that, I worked on a Mac and everything was uploaded to iCloud which completely messed with the Regard3D software so that caused me quite a bit of trouble as well; however, I was still able to overcome that in order to create reasonable replications of my objects. In terms of assisting with the layout of the gallery, we had to figure out an effective and organized way to set the objects to let users know what they were and how they were made. We ended up allowing the user to fly with a flashlight in their controller hand to interact with the objects.
Overall, from this experience, what I gained was the knowledge of the process of photogrammetry. The experience itself was not pleasant, but it was not all bad. The difficulty of actually recreating the objects was large considering all the setbacks we had; however, it gave me a good idea of what video game designers / graphic designers may have to deal with when they recreate objects using photogrammetry. I think the skill itself could be a useful one to have depending on what field of computer science I plan to pursue, so overall it was a good experience to go through.
All work related to this project has not been uploaded to GitHub due to size limits but here is a video of my team going through the gallery and showing the objects we have created through photogrammetry. You will need to download the video in order to watch it.