It is the burden of creative people that they are interested in too many things.
I’ve experienced this personally, perhaps you have too.
A way this might manifest for you is finding it difficult to close personal projects. There are numerous starts but very few closures. It is tempting to fall in love with the idea phase. It is easy to gravitate towards that comfort zone. Grinding to finish takes too much focus on that one thing because there are glittering lures everywhere to pull you away to another interest, and make another start.
A lure for me, for a while, has been the belief — and anecdotal evidence — that using one’s voice while in Virtual Reality, i.e. speaking aloud in a VR application that acknowledges what you say, contributes positively to one’s sense of presence in that virtual environment.
1. Designing for a modern 3D world: A UX design guide for VR
2. Scripting Javascript Promise In Spark AR For Beginners
3. Build your first HoloLens 2 Application with Unity and MRTK 2.3.0
4. Virtual Reality: Do We Live In Our Brain’s Simulation Of The World?
Expressing ourselves by speaking is a fundamental part of one’s identity, but also a fundamentally embodied activity. When we speak, the voice comes from somewhere in our body, not just our mouth and brain (even if factually it does).
So, I’ve wanted to use this as a design driver and hypothesis and dabbled a few times with the available voice-based bot services out there, such as Amazon Lex and IBM’s Watson Assistant. To make the long story short, recently I took part in a week-long VR game jam and took the opportunity to focus on another go at the hypothesis.
It took Unity, some Creative Commons assets, hours and hours of watching online tutorials, IBM Watson, an Oculus Quest headset, some creative thinking, and reading poetry, to get this done.
All of these things were familiar to me — through fits and starts over a span of multiple years — but in the end, it was those numerous failed starts that amassed the tacit knowledge I leveraged to get things done in 7 days or so.
The output was this:
“Start Close in” is far from finished, but it demonstrates the idea and the tech works, most of the time.
In short, it aims to give a concrete example of at least two things:
- Breaking out of existing genres and creating something unique to VR, with the added dimension of voice input.
- Evidencing how cleverly using a combination of (mostly free) services and software (Unity, IBM Watson) can enable interesting experiments; experiments that might inspire others to explore similar avenues of thought.
As a byproduct, making this gave me a confidence boost regarding my own skillsets — what I am able to do and put out to the world. I’m still not a programmer, but I made a thing that works through a code I wrote.
You can do that, too. In this book Atomic Habits, James Clear writes about productive habit formation and how that begins with your identity. You become what you do, by habit.
Start telling yourself the story that you are a maker. Go make cool shit. Begin embracing the failed starts, and recognise the tacit knowledge you have accumulated through them. It’s all led you to this point.
