We invite you to join or login to the ArcGIS Maps SDK for game engines beta program and download the latest pre-release for ArcGIS Maps SDK for Unreal Engine, built for Unreal Engine 5. Feel free to peruse the product documentation, including release notes, for more information on enhancements as well as resolved and known issues.
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The first production release of the ArcGIS Maps SDK for Unreal Engine will require Unreal Engine 5. For developers who choose to remain on Unreal Engine 4 and need time to transition to Unreal Engine 5, the ArcGIS Maps SDK for game engines beta program will remain open until the end of 2022. Previous beta releases targeting Unreal Engine 4 and some offline documentation will be available to download, but feedback options and community support will be limited.
The roots of this article started in my previous research on digital dance preservation. As a choreographer and digital archivist, I was intent on finding a practical way to preserve human movement as accurately as possible. At first I believed very strongly in all the existing preservation practices, whether it was collecting good metadata, using high quality video for documentation or ensuring that a repository followed the Open Archival Information System [OAIS] model. These practices worked well in the archives and libraries where I worked, but were not so feasible as an independent artist working alone. From an archivist's perspective it meant processing haphazardly maintained content. From a choreographer's perspective, it was frustrating to be unable to see and analyze all the nuances of how a dance work was performed.
In 2013, I started to become more invested in the Boston dance community and its history since the 1950s. In an effort to fill gaps in the existing documentation, I was inspired by The Dance Oral History Project created by the New York Public Library .
This problem eventually formed the basis for my practice-based research on creating movement-based pathographies. My original motivation for using mocap and VR was to give patients and viewers alike a sense of privacy. After constructing my initial prototype, however, I realized another benefit. By using mocap data to create an animation viewable in VR, viewers could have complete freedom to examine the movement from any angle or distance. In some ways this meant a more unbiased form of moving image documentation in that the framing of the content had not been decided for the viewer.
To address the issues of providing an enhanced viewing experience without being extravagant in one's technology choices, it may be useful to look to the field of dance for performance strategies that can help add nuance. The connection between dance and oral histories is that dances are a part of oral tradition that can be intangible and ephemeral in such a way that challenges the act of documentation itself . Furthermore, "Dance also challenges other experts to think about devising imaginative methods or scoring, notating, annotating, and archiving a processual, somatic, and multisensory practice" . Since a movement history is still based on a personal memory, it would be logical to look at how somatic dance forms that embrace the unique attributes of an individual body for strategies on how to recall, express and perform embodied experiences in a physical manner.
Somatic movement practices often require practitioners to explore the idiosyncrasies of their bodies and their relationship to other bodies in a way that generates a sort of autobiography. These movement practices can also be used to literally illustrate life events which leads to a form of double-layered autobiography. Improvisational methods may incorporate internal and/or external questioning which then becomes reminiscent of an oral history interview. The range of somatic movement practices range from the Asian disciplines of yoga and tai chi to more recent systems such as Feldenkrais and Body Mind Centering. Within that spectrum lie somatic dance forms that have become increasingly used for artistic expression: Authentic Movement, Contact Improvisation and Skinner Releasing Technique amongst others. Steve Paxton, founder of Contact Improvisation, was known for his Small Dance ritual which guides the individual to examine their own body. This self-examination was later part of Paxton's documentation about his process which essentially served a sort of autobiography of his body .
The concept of phenomenology is the central driver for illness narratives as evidenced by the research of aforementioned medical humanists Frank and Carel as well as S. Kay Toombs and others. Within narrative medicine, phenomenology refers to the experience of having an illness, whether referring to the sensation of symptoms, daily living and/or contextual experiences . It therefore makes sense to extend the narrative medicine approach to movement-based illness narratives regardless of documentation method. For my own work Lithium Hindsight 360, a set of somatic movement-based illness narratives about bipolar disorder, I referenced the VR ballet [pain]Byte developed by Genevieve Smith-Nunes . Both Lithium Hindsight 360 and [pain]Byte are based on the lived experiences of their respective creators with an emphasis on community engagement. Anonymizing the identities of the mocap performers for ethical purposes was another common factor.
In terms of performance, the most important factor is to remember that there is a difference between documenting, performing and performing for documentation purposes. Subjects may need to exaggerate their movements slightly to avoid occlusion issues. This too depends on the type of system and the level of subtlety being captured. For example, a motion sensor like the Kinect can capture full-body, facial and finger data with a single device.
On a technical level, there are some challenges specific to the preservation of mocap data and VR projects. In 2006 it was already noted that the quantity of mocap data produced from a session could be quite large and was not easily searchable . WhoLoDancE repository tools have optimized searchability of movement to a certain degree but a mainstream non-textual search engine has still yet to emerge in any discipline.
From a VR perspective, one must decide whether to use an existing game engine such as Unity or engineer a bespoke solution. Further objects such as 3D models, texture maps, supplementary audio and video may also need to be taken into consideration. Fundamentally, the digital curation of movement histories comprised of mocap data and VR projects is the same as for any other set of digital objects in that standardized file formats (i.e. fbx, bvh) used across multiple industries are typically used for the source objects. If anything, the most challenges lie in the lack of a standard file format for gaming engines such as Unity and Unreal. Constant changes in both hardware and software also make it difficult to pinpoint a single ideal long-term (>25 years) file format for any of the objects contained within a VR project.
If you would like to learn more about materials, I recommend reading the Material Inputs page in the Unreal Engine documentation. Learning what these inputs do will allow you to create more advanced materials. 2ff7e9595c
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