Hello and welcome back!

We hope everyone has been able to safely reconnect with friends and family, and send all in the path of Ian our best wishes a quick and smooth recovery.

This week, our team was able to get in contact with the director of the Disability Resource Center (DRC) at UF and send out a brief email to any blind or low vision students who would be interested in speaking with us. We look forward to getting responses and hope to interview several students in the upcoming weeks.

During some of our team meetings this week, we noticed that our discussions started to loop around in circles, revolving around a core question of exactly what our project scope was, especially in the use case or application our product would primarily focus on. As our project is heavily researched based, understanding the direction and setting a clear path for ourselves is very important in the long run. We considered various topics such as input systems, what defined VR applications vs. normal desktop apps or 3D games, and the possible inclusion of a headset or other controllers. We also brainstormed and drafted up several product architecture ideas, but without a concrete grasp of our project and scope, everything was still very abstract.

After meeting with our coach and liaison, however, we realized that we were thinking too much and not physically creating anything – in other words, we were making assumptions without any actual feedback or validation from our target users and testing of our prototype. Thus, for the next week, our team has set out specific tasks and deliverables and aim to first create a simple 3D space in Unity with a couple basic user tasks that we can present to students and get feedback from.