2019 Homework


All are due Friday at 9pm Chicago Time



Week 11 Homework

One of Microsoft's research projects is Holoportation -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0

Given what we are going to talk about this week in collaboration, and what we have discussed previously in regards to tracking and cameras and interaction, and given your experience playing with the holoLens back at the beginning of the class, give your critical analysis (positives, and negatives) of this work in the typical homework webpage writeup.



Week 8 Homework

With GPUs becoming smaller and more powerful, and AI improving through Deep Learning and other techniques, we are seeing computers gaining a better ability to classify things on the fly, so for example one could classify things in videos as in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPU2HistivI and we have apps that tell us what song is playing nearby, allowing us to augment our knowledge of both the visual and auditory space around us. Imaging you had these tools running constantly on a phone or eyewear. Write your typical 1 page on how you would make this helpful and not annoying?


Week 7 Homework

A new trend in AR apps is evaluating virtual furniture placed within the room where you are thinking about putting it. For this homework you should try out one of these apps - IKEA Place is one example. Take a room you know, place a piece of appropriate furniture in it and take a screen capture. Then do the same thing for a place you normally wouldn't see a piece of furniture like that - like a bed in the middle of Halsted St. or a stove in the middle of campus. Add these two snapshots to another homework page and write down the typical one page of your thoughts on how AR applications like this could be effectively used in the future.

A few other potential apps can be found at https://thinkmobiles.com/blog/best-ar-furniture-apps/


Week 5 and 6 Homework

The homework for the two weeks of presentations involves each person downloading and running two project files from the class (either 1 per week, or 2 at the end of the 2 weeks), other than yours, that you thought were particularly good, and writing up two 1-page documents on what you really liked about them and why. Each of the GitHub repositories should have images of the front and back covers of the chosen book. Your writeup should include screenshots to illustrate your points and a photo the AR app running.  Include an image (e.g. screen snapshot) showing you running each of these applications in AR.

Note that these comments are _not_ being taken into account for our grading of the projects. The purpose here is for you to actively reflect on someone else's response to the same project goals and think about other solutions. Both pages are due Friday 10/4 at 9pm Chicago time.


Week 4 Homework

One nice set of AR applications for smartphones has been those that let you point your phone up at a part of the sky (usually at night, but of course they work anytime) and have the app tell you what stars, planets, etc. are visible from where you are. If you want to know if that bright light on the horizon is a UFO or the planet Venus, then this might help. For this homework you should try out one of these apps - Pocket Universe is a nice one for ios, or Star Tracker or SkyView on Android. Knowing where you are on Earth and the orientation of your phone, its pretty easy to tell what celestial objects you are looking at since they don't move very fast. Take one screenshot when you are looking at the moon and another looking at Saturn. Please do not point your camera towards the sun while doing this - its bad for the camera's optics. As with the google Translate homework, add these two images to your homework page and then imagine a future where this app is built into typical AR glasses as a way to get more information about the world around you and quickly answer the question 'what is that?' In this case let's just focus on things in the Sky. Write about what other data sources might you want to integrate into an app like this? What different layers of information might you want to combine in this view.



Week 3 Homework

google translate in its smartphone app shows some of the more 'serious' potential of augmented reality as it allows you to automatically translate text into other languages. For this assignment you should find something in a foreign language in the real world (not by bringing up images in google) and take a photo of it, and then save 2 or 3 screens when google translate is translating it with varying degrees of success. Create another public webpage on your site and attach the photos and a page of text you have written on how you think this capability would be most effectively used. Right now on your smartphone it allows you to have a lens that you can move over the real world and see it modified on the phone's screen, but what if you were running this in a future AR pair of glasses or contact lenses, and it was automatically translating everything it sees to the language of your choice and hiding the original text from real world. What are the pros and cons of that? How much control do you think the user should have over the way the synthetic is mapped over the real.


Week 2 Homework

By this Friday at 9pm Chicago time you should have Unity set up and running with Vuforia and have gone through the 'getting started with Vuforia in Unity' tutorial. As part of that you should create or download a 3d model of your choice and have that model stand on the Astronaut image target (either printed out or on your phone or laptop screen) when the camera points at it. Make sure the model is an appropriate size to see it on the Astronaut image target. Take a screenshot showing the 3d model standing on the image target and add that to a new webpage that you add to your 428 website and a page of text on your initial thoughts about uses for this technology, assuming you were viewing it through your phone, and then through a pair of AR glasses that you were always wearing. If you use a model you found on the web be sure it is available for use and give appropriate attribution to its creator(s).

here is a link to the astronaut image target


Week 1 Homework

As you experience the different demos you should think about the advantages and disadvantages of each platform and where each is most applicable. For the first assignment, by Friday 8/30/19 at 9pm Chicago time you should create a public web page, which we will continue to use for the remaining assignments and projects, so please create a landing page where in future you can add links to a number of other pages. Write one 8.5" x 11", 10pt font, normal margins equivalent amount of text about the advantages and disadvantages of the different VR and AR platforms. Email the location of this page to Andy and the TA so we can add it into the course webpages below.

One place to start, if you don't have a public website already, is people.uic.edu (https://people.uic.edu/). You can use UIC's vpn (http://accc.uic.edu/service/vpn) along with 2 factor authentication (https://accc.uic.edu/tag/anyconnect) to mount this directory on your personal computer for ease of moving files around (smb://<yourID>.people.uic.edu/). You can use any other hosting service you wish, but these pages must be publicly viewable by everyone in the class at least until the end of the course. You can use any publicly available templates as long as you cite them, or create your own.



last revision

7/6/2020