Week 6

Name

I’ve named the project! London Smog it is. I’ve never had a London Fog but a friend tried to order the flavor at an ice cream shop this weekend and it only felt fitting.

WebXR

One of my main hopes to improve the project based on playtesting feedback was to improve the immersion in VR. I talked to some VR developer friends about browsers, and downloaded everything in both the Quest and Apple Vision App Stores that could serve as a web browser without toolbar UI. Unfortunately, no chrome-less web browsers seem to exist on either platform, a major omission.

My next idea was to dust off WebXR to make a fully immersive VR space with a frame inside it showing the website. I spent over five hours debugging VR setups and working on shaders/3D fog generation code to sync to the article experience, prior to discovering HTML cannot be displayed in WebXR. I sunk about half my development time this week into this idea, which was a major flop. Like every other component of this project, I should have validated the feasibility dramatically earlier in the process before getting bogged down making all the detailed pieces perfect.

WebXR continues to be an unbelievable struggle every time I use it, and nearly every project I’ve attempted to integrate it into has failed and/or taken 10x longer than planned.

Circuit

I got the circuit working again!! I went through every cable and replaced most of them, simplified the circuit slightly, and realized there was one missing connection, of the power between the rails on either side. Hearing the alternating buzz of the motors was a joy.

Schematic

I made some fixes to the schematic this week, including pulling out wires to make them easier to read, and labeling the USB-C power input to the Arduino.