CS 428: 2021 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 like smart phones, and how they could be used in the future as that technology evolves into glasses or contact lenses.

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

Week 15 Homework

Week 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

Week 7 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 we see as in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPU2HistivI and we have apps that tell us what song is playing nearby (Shazam, SoundHound) what birds are tweeting nearby (Merlin), allowing us to augment our knowledge of both the visual and auditory space around us. Imagine you had these tools running constantly on AR eyewear. Write your typical 1 page on how you would make this helpful and not annoying.

Week 5 and 6 Homework

Week 4 Homework

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. You should find something in a foreign language in the real world (not by bringing up images in google, and no the posters in the classroom don't count either) and take a photo of it 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 you should have built the two physical cubes you will need for Project 1, and started work on your knickknack. This homework encourages people to get that working by taking the sample Project 1, removing the UFO and the cow and the aliens, and the beam effect and adding another character or object standing at an appropriate size on the top. You could add a palm tree or your favorite anime character. You can create this model yourself or download a simple model from the internet (make sure the model's creator has given permission for use). This does not have to be your final choice for your knickknack.

Run the project in Unity and use your webcam or your phone to take a photo showing this new knickknack overlaid over one of your physical cubes on your desk or in your hand, and add that photo to the top of your HW2 submission. If you use a model you found on the web be sure to give appropriate attribution in your HW2 submission; if it is a model you created yourself then state that. There is no additional writing for this week's HW.

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 Hololens 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 per project). 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 along with 2 factor authentication to mount this directory on your 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.

There is a UIC page on mounting the directory at https://help.uillinois.edu/TDClient/37/uic/KB/ArticleDet?ID=476

For the moment this webpage should have at least your name and the course name and number. And this does have to be a webpage with text on it and not just a file in a directory.

last revision 8/25/2022 - added link to UIC page on mounting the remote directory for people.uic.edu