Portfolio brief reflection
I was excited to start this project with Hugo. We were going to create a parody of Vice News together called Clamp News. It was going well, seemed pretty funny and we had half a decent script down. But predictably, our erratic schedules weren’t aligning, so I continued with the back up project I had created - All Sought Inc.
The name is one of my favourite things about this project, I love the play on words, I think ‘sought’ is a little intriguing and ‘inc’ or incorporation is what we’re also in the business of - incorporating brands. Finding a branding identity for this project was the most challenging branding I’ve created so far. This is as I wanted it to look sleek and cool but also having the design quality of looking still in development, which emulated what my company’s process.
After speaking with Brian about the development of my project he flagged a concern that maybe a website, brand and pitch may not be enough to satisfy a high marking criteria. So I decided to flesh it out by taking a leap into the void and creating a VR co-working office space. I felt like this perfectly fit in with my project so far as I planned for the group to meet up on a weekly basis, which I wanted to do so that people could commit to all sought whilst still maintaining a full time job. This meant there was a sizeable gap between each time we saw each other, which I worried may impact the fluidity of project progression, with the VR space it means that we can all engage with the project whenever we get a chance.
If this project has taught me anything, it’s that VR still needs a few more years. I’ve been working on High Fidelity, I software created by the founder of ‘Second Life’ the alternate reality that blew up in the early 2000’s. Since then the open source software has come a long way and now has a cryptocurrency and marketplace built into it, enabling commerce in virtual worlds. This was an imperative factor when I was researching and deciding which VR software to use as there’s a fair few now. However High Fidelity looks like it’s here to stay. It took me nearly a full week just to set up the world and troubleshoot what the actual issues were that weren’t allowing me to access the asset server and start creating the world. After going through umpteen IT staff I finally managed to get whitelisted on the network! I thought it’d all be plain sailing from here but it really wasn’t, setting up the world proved almost as hard and I begun to see the gigantic learning curve ahead of me. What made the curve even steeper was that there wasn’t a super large community like there is for the Adobe Suite, so if I needed something answering I often had to discover the solution myself. Normally I’m guided by my software intuition, but as I’d never worked with 3D software before, everything was brand new to me. From my research I found that High Fidelity was definitely the forefront of the social VR world, but despite this I still found so many errors and had so many crashes with the software, some things simply didnt make sense and others were impossibly difficult with overwhelming scripting in unfamiliar languages. In spite of this I think I’ve created a pretty great world. It was very frustrating having to spend the majority of my time finding out solutions to technical issues as it was a different workflow from what I was used to doing - where I couldn’t focus the majority of my efforts on creative pursuit, and making little if any progress. In the end I got it all up and running and it’s finally accessible to everybody, although I spent a considerable amount of time learning how to texture primitive objects, going through the most convoluted (and only) system involving server management. You will be able to see the outcome of my efforts on the right hand side of the main desk, a small textured ball. I spent further days attempting to attach this imported texture onto the primitive object I had created in my VR domain, which I think I would have endlessly attempted if it wasn’t for the luck of a ‘help desk’ suddenly appearing in the High Fidelity world. After spending nearly another full day just trying work around solutions with them they finally realised that texturing primitive objects is currently unsupported, which is completely illogical in my eyes - especially when it doesn’t state this in the High Fidelity documentation which I must have read 20 times by this point. I also was unable to export my world, texture it in blender/maya then reimport it, so unfortunately I’ve had to leave it as an untextured world. I think when I get the time I’m going to rebuild the entire world the same from scratch, but with textures. Despite the world being untextured I think it still looks great and I love some of the features that I’ve built into it, which make it genuinely useful as a workspace. For example, after walking through the first arch you’re met with an embedded Trello board where progression can be monitored and updated (if you’re logged in with permissions). I think it also plays to the advantages of VR with straight access to the painting room it allows the team to quickly express what they’re envisioning in front of us, in three dimensions. It was fantastic to get a great insight and a thorough exploration into VR and the VR community (of which I actually came member of the month in the High Fidelity forums) as it is definitely something that will be prevalent in the future and it’s easy to see the amazing opportunities ahead of the technology. Although I would note that building in VR is currently extremely nauseating.
I believe there’s true strength in the core idea and model of All Sought Inc itself. It’s a new approach to developing ideas, products and profit. It’s extremely appropriate from my standpoint as I have no money of my own to invest into paying salaries, yet it’s still a fair system which people are happy to work for. I think it’s also extremely appropriate for myself as it frames the rest of my aspirations, creating a parent company for my commercial successes to live under will help bring respect and direction to the holistic body of business work that I will be completing. I’m impressed that I have managed to sign up five impeccable individuals to the think tank already and I think I’m in an excellent position striding forward with it into summer. The next step for me will be securing a spot for the Sunday sessions.








