R34 Airship Project - Week 1 - Researching the R34

When picking a project for emerging tech, I was torn between the airship project and the energy efficient car. When we went down to see what each project would involve, it seemed that the car needed a lot of mechanical work before modifications could actually be made, I didn't feel like that was what I was doing this course for so I decided to take on the airship project with Tom and Henry.

In the airship project, we are required to create some sort of interactive experience that will be shown at the 100 year anniversary of the landing of the landing of the first double crossing of the Atlantic by the R34 Airship. We've been asked to do this by a museum in Diss, there is a lot of freedom to do anything we want for this project, however for our assignment we have to make sure that we use emerging technologies to do it.

We started our project by researching the Airship. While looking around about the R34, we found that even though it had a short lifespan, it has a few interesting stories. This gave me the idea of an interactive storytelling VR experience, where the player will be presented multiple stories, depending on how we decide to implement control, the player will be able to either look at or hover their hand over a story and it will start playing, during a story, the player will be able to look around and there may be some interactive parts to the environment around them but to keep historical accuracy they will not be able to change the outcome of the story.

Today we went to Diss to meet Basil Abbot, he is the manager at the museum that asked us to take on this project. We went to talk about the space we will have at the event, how long he wants our work to be on display for, and just to get some more information about the airship. He had a lot of pictures and news articles that we can use for reference while we work on this project. We also discussed a few of the ideas that we had with him.

He loved the idea of 3D Printing lots of small R34 airships so that we can then send them out to schools and have the children paint them, it would be a good way to get kids interested in the airship and could be good for advertising the main event in July next year.

We talked about an AR app for mobile devices where you will point the camera at a card with a picture on it, and it will show either a 3d model or show more information in 3d space. you can then move the card around and the model/information will move with it.

I think we all agreed that the best idea would be the VR Storys, it will be what engages people most out of all of the ideas we had, that being said I
think we might 3dprint some airships to see how much effort it takes. If it is easy enough we will probably print lots and send them to schools.

This week we will experiment with the different ideas to see which ones we will be able to complete in the time that we have.