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Stepping into 3D with Unity, the soul-crusher
Carl Corry is a journalism instructor at Suffolk County Community College and freelance journalist who has held leading roles at Newsday, News 12 and Long Island Business News.
journalism, social media, digital journalism, smartphone journalism, media
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Stepping into 3D with Unity, the soul-crusher

I’m sure some day soon I’ll find Unity 3D to be a beneficial tool that I’ll use in journalism. For now, I think it was largely to created to crush souls.

We were tasked to come up with a basic scene using the free version of Unity — a little landscape here, a little grass there, maybe a rock or other object added to the mix to make things interesting. Sounded simple enough, but at each stage, it felt as if I could do nothing right. None of the things I just mentioned would happened as they were noted in the tutorial.

So I did what every smart journalist does and I brought in the big guns: my 9-year-old Minecraft gamer who apparently has some familiarity with Unity. She was able to help me establish how to get my grassy landscape finally running, and she stayed with me for hours as we tried to piece it all together.

As it turned out, I was able to create a basic scene with mountains, a new sky and even a reading chair appropriately situated in the middle of a desert. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to upload the final product to YouTube, or to get my first-person virtual reality cameras moving around.

Wide-angle shot of my Unity scene

Wide-angle shot of my Unity scene

In the future I can envision doing simulations of events or recreations of crime scenes based on witness and police accounts. And I expect there to be ways to create engaging, educational experiences for the public.

For now, Unity and I have a lot of relationship-building to do.

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