Month: February 2017

 

In thought that it would be interesting to try and make a ‘haunting’ for this assignment. Maybe something where the app reveals a ghost, then the ghost follows you around. That seemed like it could be easy to achieve, since the location services code seemed understandable and straightforward to use. Also, I spent some time building the Unity Roll a Ball tutorial this week, so I was feeling better about Unity too.

I did some YouTube research and I found a tutorial that seemed pretty close to the thing I wanted to build (here). This seemed like a great fit for me. I am still having some trouble understanding how things are constructed with Unity, following this would let me follow along with building the project and then tinker with the project afterwards. Plus, this would be an opportunity to learn how to build to my phone. Great!

I built the example project, but I had a great deal of trouble getting Unity to build the xcode project. After exhausting my google-fu and asking Rui it seemed like the best coarse of action was to rebuild the project I did that, and spent several hours updating unity, xcode, and my os, I finally got a build on my phone working.

 

The GPS location data doesn’t seem to be working yet, but it seems close. Right now I’m not sure how to go about debugging that problem.

 

My original plan for this assignment was to use an image of mountains in the Catskills to create an informational layer that would identify the mountain and perhaps give some information about it. I would love to include an AR component in my thesis, which is largely about the outdoors and this would have been a little experiment for that. However, the images I was working with were not strong trackers and Unity never picked up on the image.

So, I tried something else. I have this pillow with a pretty bold pattern on it:

I thought that it would be neat to try and bring the little faces to life. What are they like? What are they up to during the day when I’m not home? Do they resent being squished all the time?

 

That plan didn’t work either. Even though the tracking image was pretty strong, it never picked up. Do patterns on a 3D object not work well? Maybe?

 

 

At this point I decided to go for just making something work. Anything. I choose to do this week’s project alone so I would have to do all the work myself and learn about Unity (since I’m a total n00b). I’d hoped to be able to put in some animations and cools stuff, but at this point I was really frustrated and just getting the darn thing working was my main focus. I decided to try augmenting a book, since their covers are flat and graphic and should make good targets. I picked Hyperbole and a Half for my book. The cover seemed like it would work as a target and the cartoon style of the book seemed like something I could replicate with stock shapes in Unity. Maybe I could make the book into the character from the book. Also, the harried, crazy, lost tone of the stories suited my state of mind that this point.

 

I did eventually get something working, but not as much as I would have liked. It took me some time to get my head around simple things like rotating objects (seriously, it is so counterintuitive!) but eventually I got something working. It’s not pretty, but I did learn a bunch about Unity.

week2 AR from coldsoup753 on Vimeo.

 

 

This project is an AR sketch using projection. The project uses blob detection to sense the color of the paper being pinned to the sewing form. Then, it projects an image of a heart over the paper. Code for this project is based on this exercise from Dan Shiffman.