This week’s lecture was from Lee Mason, a digital artist who creates work for exhibitions and, a lot of the time, uses VR or AR in his work. He talked about his artwork, including some of the NFTs that he’s created. NFTs are something I’d definitely heard of and have seen some exhibited in the Moco museum in Amsterdam. When these were first gaining popularity, I had thought about creating them myself, but dismissed this path as the concept of an NFT does seem quite strange. However, from listening to Lee’s experiences, making this kind of art opens up a community of artists who exchange and support one another. This got me thinking about what type of career I want in the future. Although ‘freelancing’ and having to sell yourself and your work seem stressful and scary, it seems that if you can pull it off, it would be highly rewarding, so I am intrigued by this path.

In my VR project, I got started on designing and creating my custom interactable and writing the script for it. My goal was to make a functional record player where the player could pick up and attach different vinyls to the record player, and they would play different songs. This turned out to be harder and more frustrating than I thought. To start with, inside Unity, after creating the needed objects for the record player and assigning them all the right components, the same that I had done with other elements in the tutorial, I found that I could not pick up my vinyls, and after a slightly painful amount of time of researching, comparing and trying different things, I figured out that all I had done wrong is that I had not unchecked the ‘is static?’ box. I was glad to fix this, but it was demotivating that such a tiny mistake took me so long.

Writing the script for the record player was also quite frustrating at first, as I had barely used C# before. I was trying to get it done quickly as I didn’t have much time left to finish the project, but cutting corners and skimming forums made it take longer. I finally decided to write out very simple pseudocode and went through it line by line, carefully researching how to translate it into C#. This has taught me to always take things step by step and not rush when doing something new.