Mitosis In Unity – Project Proposal
Team: UnitedInUnity
Team Members: Ethan Hicks, Forrest Sable, Rachel Offutt-Reed
For most individuals who attend any sort of public schooling in their lives, they are exposed to rudimentary biology in elementary and middle school. This exposure is typically in the form of YouTube videos, pictures of biological processes, and lectures with rudimentary drawing of biological processes on whiteboards and displayed on projector screens. What if there was a more interactive way to experience biological processes, such as cellular mitosis, in a way that is engaging and informative? This is where our team comes in; we are United In Unity, and we propose the design and implementation of an interactive mitosis simulator designed via the game engine Unity.
Our project is an interactive cellular mitosis simulator designed in the game engine, Unity. Essentially, we are making a three-dimensional model of a simple cell that goes through the process of cellular mitosis. The user of our project will be able to interact with different parts of the cell and receive information about what is going on, learning more in – depth about the aspects they so choose. The user will also be able to click “Next” or “Back” buttons, allowing them the ease of exploring cellular mitosis at their own pace.
Our team is specifically suited for tackling this project and bringing the best possible product to completion because all of our members have prior experience coding in Unity. With this knowledge, our team does not have to waste time learning the software, as any other team would have to do; we can dive right into the project. Our team also has an excellent repartee between members, working seamlessly together to complete the desired project. Lastly, our team is excellent at project management, specifically subdividing and converging on tasks and describing/planning/ organizing those tasks on GitHub.
The primary customer for this product would be primary and secondary educational institutes. As cellular mitosis is a part of the public school system’s biology curriculum from 4th grade onto college level biology courses, educational institutions of all levels could utilize this product. The reason this product is so desired is the lack of interactiveness and detail in traditional methods of teaching cellular mitosis. Reading papers on the subject are dry and it is hard to visualize. YouTube videos can offer animation, but they are not in depth, and have no links to external sources for the curious user. Traditional lectures in a classroom move quickly. The professor does not have time to answer every little question about mitosis, can’t offer up citations for better understanding, and often does not have a three dimensional model of the cell as it divides; our product will provide all of these criterion.
From the customer’s point of view, our solution offers student s a way to learn cellular mitosis in the comfort of their own home and at any level, allowing for this product to work across all age levels. Teachers and professors could not only have students who understand cellular mitosis more in depth, but also more time in the classroom, as they are not hindered by trying to draw cellular mitosis on the board, find a good enough video, or answer many questions.
To measure our success, we will deploy our system to four schools: one middle school, one high school, one community college, and one public college. Then, we will have an open forum amongst the teachers and professors of these institutions asking and answering questions about the system after they have used it in their classrooms. If the overall consensus of the educators believes the product to be useful, we will continue to be a customer-centric company and implement for biological processes for the customers in the simulator.
Our software will perform a simple mitosis simulation. It is also interactive so that the user can click on different parts of the cell and get information about them. This program can be used to educate people about cell mitosis in an interactive and engaging way. The program will consist of a main menu in which the user will have the option to start the simulation or go to an options menu where they can adjust the settings of the simulation so that it will run the best on the user’s computer. The simulation is the main part of the program in which the user will be able to watch mitosis happen in 3D and the user will also be able to pause the simulation and view the induvial parts of the cell.
A customer would could really appreciate that it is a simulation since they can run it multiple times and pause it. Unlike watching cells under a microscope go through mitosis a simulation can be paused and they can run the simulation as many times as they want. It could be useful in chemistry classes teaching kids what cell mitosis looks like. If a teacher was to do a simulation in from of the class, she could show what cell mitosis looks like since you can’t in a school day watch mitosis happen since mitosis takes many hours. That is a very important factor of having a simulation of mitosis is that it basically eliminates the time factor. You can watch mitosis at any speed you want and then watch it again at different angles to further students understandings.
We will be using Unity to develop our game, which is a game engine to build our interactive simulation. Unity has a lot of built-in tools to allow for simple games to made in 2D and 3D. Since it is a big game engine there is lots of documentation and tutorials on many different topics that are freely available.
Forrest Sable has five years of experience using Unity3D, and some experience using Blender if additional 3D modeling is necessary. Forrest also plans to provide input on the workflow of the project as a whole. Officially, Forrest’s role is Lead Software Engineer, and will head sprints in software developments, and also contribute to documentation.
Rachel Reed is a junior in Computer Science and has recently started exploring and designing in Unity. Her experience stems from another product design and implementation project of a three dimensional substation in the game engine Unity. Rachel will be the team lead in handling the proper documentation of this project; this entails organizing the GitHub, assigning tasks for the documents required, organizing and editing the finished documents, and setting a schedule. Rachel also will be aiding in the completion of designing the mitosis simulator by completing programming tasks handed down to her via the Lead Programmer, Forrest.
Ethan Hicks is a junior in Computer Science and has used Unity in the past for making some very simple games. He has not used the newest version of Unity, but that said it should not hinder his ability to use it. He plans to renew his expertise in the basics of it since I have not used it in a while but like mention in the technology section, there are plenty of tutorials and documentation to help him. His role in this project will be to program all the user interfaces (UIs) in the project and some other basic programming where necessary. Ethan also contributes to the documentation when necessary.
The project will be implemented as a series of steps through the mitosis process. The flow of the program should start at a main menu with basic graphical settings, a quit button, and a start button, which will lead to the main Unity scene with the first stage of mitosis onscreen. The user will have arrows to move forward and backward through the mitosis process, with animations playing between each phase, and nodes on the display that indicate interactive elements with more information on particular processes and organelles. The base product will show animal cell mitosis, and plant cell mitosis can be added at a later time, as it is mostly the same with a few key differences.
The four phases of mitosis will each show the changes in the cell nucleus, the duplicated DNA and chromosomes, the centrosomes, and other important cell parts. The cell and its organelles will be represented with basic 3D models, likely with simple material textures. Important organelles will be interactive elements in the program, which will have more detailed text explaining what is happening to these particular parts in each phase of mitosis.
Between each phase, short animations will play to show how the cell parts are changing and moving through the cell as it begins to split in two. These will be simple translation animations that should not be overly demanding, and will help the user understand how each part moves through the mitosis process. Basic scripting in C# will guide these animations and the rest of the user interface for the program. Unity allows developers to build state machines easily and attach them to triggers from scripting, so it will be simple to attach animations to button presses and possibly show animations in the interactive portions of the model.
With our team’s extensive experience in designing simulations and games in Unity, as well as our differing skill specialties, such as documentation and organization, UI development, and Blender modeling, the timeline given to complete the project is feasible. We plan on meeting face to face once a week early in the week to divide up tasks to be completed over the next week, as well as assess the completion of last week’s goals and tasks.
Legally, we are under no constraints. As Unity is entirely free to produce and sell games if the team is under fifty people, we would incur no charges; cellular mitosis is also not a patented process, so we are free to program our simulator without fear of violations of intellectual property.
Our needed resources are exceptionally limited, further ensuring our completion of the product. With Unity being a free development tool, we can create the best possible product with no cost. If the product can not be implemented fully as outlined in this document, the minimum viable product (MVP) would still be useful. The reduced functionality of the MVP would be a two dimensional representation of the cell instead of a three dimensional representation, saving on animation time and complexity. This implementation would still be of use for its interactive quality, the graphics would just be less detailed.
Our team, United In Unity, is proposing the development of an interactive cellular mitosis simulator, developed in the game engine Unity. Our customers are educators across the different grade areas; we aim to supply them with a need that has been poorly fulfilled. Our team has the expertise, the resources, and the drive to complete this product in the given time period.