Josh Daghir

VIRTUAL REALITY

As someone interested in both technology and storytelling, virtual reality is an extremely interesting topic to me. Through a selected topics course in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, I gained hands-on experience creating virtual reality experiences for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Samsung GearVR, and traditional desktops. Below are some of my VR projects.

Story Spheres

Story Spheres are 360 degree still scenes that use audio and spatial hyperlinking to come to life. They are more immersive than a traditional picture, but do not require as much viewer attention as a full 360 degree video, and are viewable on both desktop computers and mobile devices (including Google Cardboard). I used a Ricoh Theta camera to capture scenes at Syracuse University and the Newhouse academic building, and set these visuals to audio pulled from free use archives. To any fellow Orange browsing this site, see if you can find which sound actually comes from campus.

360 Degree Video

I worked with a team of students in my Virtual Reality Storytelling class to produce a short 360 video showing a broadcast on CitrusTV, Syracuse University's student-run television station. We used a camera rig of six GoPros to record the footage, and used software called VideoStitch to create a composite 360 video of the six different video files. Unfortunately, an import error resulted in a blank region in the final video. This project taught me about the difficulty of syncing six individual videos. The 360 effect of the video can be seen on some desktop browsers and on the YouTube app for smartphones.

Unity 

Unity is a game development platform and interactive scene creation software. Using Unity, I have created many interactive experiences designed for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. These are the most immersive virtual reality experiences I have created, and with the HTC Vive, users are literally able to walk through my virtual worlds. These experiences can also be viewed through a web browser without the virtual reality effect. One of my projects was featured the Virtual Reality Storytelling Hall of Fame.