I am not going to lie, this week I am having a harder time thinking of how I would apply the technology we discussed in class, to creating stories. Reality Capture certainly lends an amazing ability to replicate a landscape, an object, or a person, but as far as it being the mechanism solely through which I told a story, I would need to experiment with it more. That being said, I think that reality capture is a great way to add to a written story. I know both as a writer and a reader that words do not always have the ability to capture what we see through our own eyes. Especially for those that are visual learners, seeing something for yourself is the difference between a cursory understanding and a deep understanding.
This reality capture technology seems like it would be great for educational purposes. Instead of sitting in a class hearing lectures or just taking notes, I can’t imagine what it would’ve been like to instead maybe have an iPad in hand, and as the teacher guided you through the historic place telling you what happened there, you could simultaneously be exploring it and envisioning the historic event in a contextual setting. Pictures and videos can’t give certain situations justice when you’re considering that landscapes change or how the reality capture gives a better sense of depth and distance.
With such a brief experience with it, so far, I think that the ability to use the reality capture to then create files that can be used in Unity3D is where I would pursue its benefit to story telling. Rather than trying to find assets that others have made that are close to what you need, you can use 3D scanning to capture things in our physical world and bring them into virtual reality. This helps to recreate the physical setting of whatever story you’re trying to tell so that your audience can be immersed in an event they did not partake in, or explore a place for better understanding.
My goal, no matter how I am telling the story, is to bring people information that I feel is important. No matter my hypothesis for testing this technology out in a field test, my measurement for success remains the same. How do people feel about the subject of my story? Was the element of the reality capture lending to a better understanding of the story? Did it help the audience better empathize with the story? I think that it would be interesting to tell a group of people the same story using two different deliveries. You can use a more simple, or traditional means of story telling as a control group. I would compare their reactions to the two different stories and see how the answers to the questions above compared to each other.
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