This week, I went back to working with shaders. I had been struggling to figure out how to apply them in Unity, so I reached out to a PhD student in Dr. Interrante’s lab who has more experience working with Unity. She shared some helpful tutorials with me about the basics of applying a shader in Unity, which helped my understanding of the different places in the Unity pipeline that a shader can be applied. My mentor also found another tutorial that explains how to apply an outline shader, which uses the Unity post-processing stack.

I’ve also been looking into papers that relate to the work that we are doing, specifically cybersickness as a function of visual input. There have been some studies that explore the relationship between the level of detail in a scene and cybersickness. Dr. Interrante explained that she had a concern that these papers did not control for latency—a higher detail scene might have a lower frame rate than a lower detail scene because detail takes longer to render, which can contribute to cybersickness. This could make it difficult to identify the impact of detail alone.