Creating my own VR experience has always been my dream since the first time I put on the VR headset. It’s summer break again, while I am keeping looking for jobs, I finally get some time to work on it. I think it is a good time for me to learn Unity and C#, as next semester we will learn about VR game design, but OCAD (at least my program) never teaches you how to use software or coding in C#, so I was thinking if I could get familiar with those tools beforehand, I would definitely save my time watching Youtube tutorials/struggling with codes in September, but focus on designing the VR experience itself.
As I don’t have those fancy VR equipment at home, I think AR is the direction I will work on in summer. For VR dev, I can only try to understand some theoretical knowledge for now.
AR, Not Now
I was thrilled to start working on my very first AR project. As I am a Mac user and I don’t really have any app development skills (Swift/Java), I decided to start from ARkit. After looking around tons of tutorials, I found the one that I think is the best one for beginners to create their first AR app. It simply goes through the whole process: get a 3d model, build the unity file, run on the phone, and see the virtual object showing up on the screen!
This is the tutorial I found: put the model of an abandoned house in the real-world scene.
It’s a really straightforward tutorial, I also find his tutorial on Udemy seems to be really helpful. The price is also reasonable, I decided to start there after I complete this project.
Everything goes really well, I successfully download the model from the assets store, replace the AR hit test script, switch my game to IOS platform, and build the Xcode project. Finally, it is on my iPhone, a new app icon shows up on my screen just like the ones I downloaded from the app store! I was so excited to open it, but it turned out to be a BLACK SCREEN.
“well, that’s OK, let me google it”, I was thinking, as problem-solving and debugging are quite common for me. After trying to disable the Auto-Graphics API and Metal, and updates my Xcode, Unity (which is weird, the “check for updates” in unity always tells you that your version 2017.1 is up to date, well if you go to their website, you’ll find that the latest version has already been 2018.1.8f), I finally realized that the problem is my iPhone, it’s iPhone 6 plus, well, it has to be at least iPhone SE or iPhone 6s to support the ARKit (because of the A9 chip) … 😭😭
So I guess that I have to put aside my dream of developing the AR project for a while until I get a new iPhone or.. at least an iPad 9.7.