CS 428: 2020 Homework

This is a tentative list and they may change. Each homework will become valid the week it goes out.

A recurring theme in the homework assignments is critically thinking about how these technologies are being used today with our existing technology, and how they could be used in the future as that technology evolves.

All are due Friday at 9pm Chicago Time unless stated differently in the HW description itself.

Week 15 Homework

Week 13 and 14 Homework

Week 12 and 13 Homework

Week 11 Homework

Given what we are talking about this week in collaboration, and what we have discussed previously in regards to hardware, tracking and cameras, and interaction, give your critical analysis (positives, and negatives) of this work in the typical 1 page homework writeup.

Week 9 and 10 Homework

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 much 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. Imagine 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. Normally I would suggest a bed in the middle of Halsted St. or a stove in the middle of campus, but these days it may be a piece of furniture that is inappropriate for a particular room. 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.

Week 5 and 6 Homework

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. Knowing where you are on Earth and the orientation of your phone, its pretty easy for a computer to tell what celestial objects you are looking at since they don't move very fast.

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. Take one screenshot when you are looking at the moon and another looking at Saturn (note they may be below the horizon, also note they should all be close to the ecliptic so you don't have to search the entire sky). 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 allow you to quickly answer the question 'what is that?' In this case let's just focus on things in the sky, and not just stars and planets. 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 seen by the camera into other languages. Normally 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, though for this term it is OK to bring something up on screen, and then save 2 or 3 screens when google translate is translating it with varying degrees of success. Attach the photos and write one page of text 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 you should have Unity set up and running with Vuforia, and should have gone through the week 2 notes and video on creating the simple AR clock widget that sits on the Astronaut marker in the real world. This homework encourages people to get that working to have a start on Project 1. Using this tutorial as a basis, augment the 'black slab' clock widget to be something more interesting. You could give it a retro wood grain 70's body, or add a palm tree to make it a 'spring break' vacation clock, or add your favorite anime character standing next to it. Make it more personal. You can create these additional models yourself or download simple models from the internet (make sure the model's creator has given permission for use). You can use a printed astronaut image target, or show the astronaut marker PDF on a phone. Make sure your AR clock is an appropriate size to see it clearly sitting on the astronaut marker in the real world.

Take a screenshot from showing the augmented clock standing on the image target on a table in the real world via your webcam (or running on your smartphone), add that to the top of your HW submission and then write a page of text (as in week 1) on your initial thoughts about uses for this kind of AR technology for adding virtual 3D objects into the real world, assuming you were viewing that augmented content through your phone, and also through a pair of AR glasses that you were always wearing. How will the experience different between those two platforms? If you use a model you found on the web be sure it is available for use and give appropriate attribution in your writeup to its creator(s). If it is a model you created yourself then state that.

Week 1 Homework

1. As you experience the different demos you should think about the advantages of each platform, and where each is most applicable. Write one 8.5" x 11", 10pt font, normal margins equivalent amount of text (roughly 500 words) about the advantages of the different VR and AR platforms that were demoed (Smartphone based AR, Smartphone based 360 video, head mounted displays like the VIVE and Quest, room scale displays like CAVE2).

2. Create a public web page, which we will use to host your documentation on the course projects. Please create a landing page where in future you can add links to a number of other pages. 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. (Ideally this web page should have at least your name and the course name/number).

10/01/2020 - updated the Piazza related HWs
9/12/2020 - updated HW 4
8/29/2020 - updated HW 2
8/28/2020 - added some suggestions for the content of the web page on HW 1