This week's workshop is inspired by Mohamed Mounir's Album: أنا قلبي مساكن شعبية (Ana Albi Masaken Sahabiya). Mohamed Mounir is an Egyptian singer known for his songs that discuss his life as an Egyptian and relate back to the bedouin roots of Egypt's population. The album name loosely translates to: "My heart belongs to the old neighborhoods of Egypt". I find this name very poetic, and so it inspired me to make my design based on Egypt, my home country.

The skybox here is a panorama I took in 2021 from the balcony of my grandma's house in Cairo, Egypt. I used Photoshop to turn the panorama into a 360° photo. This step was quite tedious because at first, I tried out almost every online "panorama to 360" converter to automatically convert my panorama, but nothing worked. So, I found a tutorial on Youtube that showed me how to do it quickly.

Next, I decided to take a 3D model scan of my Airpods and add them to my design to symbolize music, since my design is based on the album name. The 3D model task was also very challenging since the scans never came out seamless, they would either have a part of the airpods chipped off, or a part of the background that I did not want, or they wouldn't even show the Airpods at all!

The photos below are of the many attempts at getting a clean scan of the Airpods.

Next, I put everything on Unity, which was the hardest step in this assignment. Since the 360° picture was set as a skybox, I had no real guide as to where and how to place my objects, which made me very confused and messed up the proportions and places of everything. The sentences scattered everywhere that say: "أنا قلبي مساكن شعبية" are the name of the album, camouflaged as signs. Ideally, I would want every pair of Airpods to play a different song by Mohamed Mounir whenever you get close to them, but I did figure out how to do it since spatially, I did not understand how and where the objects were placed.

Alternatively, I played a Mounir song in the background to give off the ambiance I wanted. The music, however, cannot be heard in the video below because it was a screen recording. Here's a link to the song: https://youtu.be/hcPUjbbObUE