Application
Due Saturday September 17th at 9pm Chicago time
Documentation Due Monday September 19th at 9pm Chicago
time
Project 1 is
an individual project focused on Augmented Reality. In the
future when everyone is wearing their AR enabled eye-wear much
of the time, what kind of future will it be? We are going to
explore this a bit by looking into some AR knickknacks. A common
thing to see in shops when you travel are small snow globes or
other little trinkets that you can take home and place on a desk
or a shelf to remind you of the place you visited. What if these
were virtual instead of real so you could have one physical
placeholder that could take on the form of many different
knickknacks for different attractions. Since these are virtual
they could also be somewhat 'smarter' than their older siblings.
In our case we are going to have these knickknacks be able to
grab the current weather and time at the location of the
attraction that they represent.
Implementing the
Project
You will be implementing
the project in Unity 2021.3.6f1 and Vuforia version 10.9 (10.9.3
at the moment).
I have created a sample starter project with
a knickknack for Roswell, New Mexico. You can grab a zip file here. Inside
the Assets/Scenes folder you will find RoswellScene. Drag that
into your hierarchy and remove the default Untitled scene.
You will need to create
the physical Merge cube so the application has something to
map my AR knickknack onto. You will also need to create the
physical Class cube for the second half of the assignment.
Here is a zip
file containing images that you can print out and then
cut out, fold, and re-assemble. I will also have some printed
copies available in class.
You will need to create a Vuforia developer
account and get a free Vuforia App License key that you can
paste into the Vuforia Configuration window in Unity in order
for Vuforia to track your cubes. On the
Vuforia developer site you can click on Develop / License
Manager and then Get Development Key to create a new
license key. You can then go to the project in Unity and
bring up Window / Vuforia Configuration and look near the
top in the Global section and add in your App License Key.
You will also need to create an account at
OpenWeather to get your API key to download weather
information for the knickknack to display. You will need to
add this key to the URL variable at the top of the
WeatherAPIScript.cs in the Assets folder. The Week 2 notes discuss
this.
At this point you should be able to run the project in
Unity, hold the Merge Cube up in front of the camera and see
and hear the knickknack appear.
This application should
give you a good starting point for creating your own AR
knickknack.
The
attraction(s) you choose could be a traditional one like Eiffel
Tower, or the Sydney Opera House, or Old Faithful in
Yellowstone, but could also be a location that has personal
significance to you like the Music Box Theatre or Manny's Deli,
or Margie's Candies, or Soldier Field. You need to pick an attraction location other
than Roswell. The location should be a real place that you can
visit, and should be small enough that it doesn't have other
attractions within it (e.g. it cant be a city like Chicago, or
a national park like Yellowstone). Locations in other countries are fine. Your
knickknack should be an appropriate, and preferably obvious,
representation of that place. The models you use should be
reasonably detailed but do not need to be photo-realistic.
You will be able to grab the local time for different
locations using http://worldtimeapi.org
60% of the points on
the project is for creating a basic knickknack using the merge
cube marker with
3 unique
models from the web (remember to cite the creators)
2 unique
models that you create on your own (more on this below)
at least
one relevant, and not annoying, ambient sound
at least
one light
the frame rate should
remain high with smooth motion and no stuttering
one side of the cube
should give the name of the attraction
one side of the cube
should give the current weather for the attraction along
with the temperature in degrees F. The
temperature should update at regular intervals (e.g. once
every 10 minutes)
one side of the cube
should give the local time for the attraction in 12
hour am/pm style
the content of the 4th
side is up to you, but it should be relevant to the
attraction
turning the cube
upside down and then back right side up should change the
lighting to a different but still useful style. Turning the cube
upside down again should change the scene back to the
original lighting
allowing the user to
view this through a webcam on their computer (or on a smart
phone)
all of the text should
be readable and fit within its
side of the cube and not overflow
40% of the points on the project are for adding a second
knickknack using the class cube marker for a different
attraction where both knickknacks are visible and function
simultaneously. The knickknack for the second attraction should
have
3 unique models from the web (remember to cite
the creators)
2 unique
models that you create on your own (more on this below)
at least
one relevant and not annoying ambient sound
at least one light
the frame rate should
remain high with smooth motion
and no stuttering with both visible at
the same time
one side of the cube
should give the name of the attraction
one side of the cube
should give the weather for the attraction along with the
temperature in degrees C. The temperature
should update at regular intervals (e.g. once every 10
minutes)
one side of the cube
should give the local time for the attraction in 24
hour style
the content of the
4th side is up to you, but it should be relevant to the
attraction
turning the cube
upside down and then back right side up should change
the lighting to a different but still useful style. Turning the cube
upside down again should change the scene back
to the original lighting
deploying
the app to an iOS or Android phone (a user should be able to
use their phone to view both of the fully functional
knickknacks at the same time)
all of the text
should be readable and fit within its side of the cube
and not overflow
Graduate students in the class also need to be
able to ...
Use the
Vuforia Astronaut ImageTarget to create a dynamic laptop
sticker. Laptop stickers are pretty popular these days to
personalize your devices, and with AR these kinds of
stickers can come to life. You should create an animated
laptop sticker designed to work with the laptop screen up,
i.e. the 3D models you add should make sense on a vertical
surface, and the scale should make sense for a laptop. You
should use 3 unique models from the web (remember to cite
the creators) and 2 unique models that you create on your
own. As usual the frame rate should remain high. The
animated sticker does not have to have anything to do with
the astronaut ImageTarget, we are just going to
standardize on that. In our hypothetical future world
there would be a 2D sticker that would look cool on your
laptop and become a cooler 3D version of itself. The topic
of the sticker is pretty open, as long as it is G rated.
Note that there is a very big difference between
getting something working and getting it working well. The first
is not that hard. The second takes much more time. You are
expected to have things working well.
Turning in the
Project You should create a GitHub page for
your project. You can integrate Unity with git so that it
will track all your changes, or just regularly push files
to git. The final project will need to be turned in via
git so we know the timestamp on the files, but it can also
be very helpful to have regular commits in case something
goes wrong so you can get partial credit for your work.Initially
this repository should be private to yourself, and then
you can make it public for turning it in.
There are
two due dates for the project.
The unity source and
application is due first. This will be turned in via
GitHub by making your repository public to at least
everyone at UIC. Be
sure to email the location of your repository to Andy
and the TA before the deadline.
The second deadline
is for the documentation.
You should create a public web page with multiple sections
(visible to anyone for at least the duration of the
course) that describes your work on the project. You can
host your web page at UIC(http://people.uic.edu),
GitHub,or the
provider of your choice, as long as it remains publicly
available to at least everyone in the class. You can use
any publicly available web templates as long as you cite
them, or create your own.
This page should have several sections including:
introduction and
description of how to use your application and the
things you can do with it written for someone who is not
taking the class and does not know what the project is
about, including showing your app running on a
smartphone (if it runs on a smartphone) or running
through a webcam in unity (if it doesn't run on a
smartphone)
link to your git
page that allows someone starting with a web browser to
easily download the source code to your project, build
it and run it. This page should have instructions on how
to build your application and list the supported version
numbers of all relevant software (Unity, VRTK, etc.),
and how to install that software. This should be very
detailed so that a person who is not in the class could
follow them and get your app running in Unity.
listing of the
source for any assets (models, textures, sounds, music)
that you used that you didn't create yourself and how
they relate to the requirements (e.g. if 15 models are
required then please give us a numbered list of them
including showing them in the scene). Also give a
numbered list of the models you created yourself with an
image showing them in the scene.
explanation of how
your models and sounds represent that attraction, and if
it is a non-traditional attraction why it is an
important to you.
link to a 5 minute
video showing off your project (see below)
at least a one page / 500 word
discussion of whether you think things like this would
become popular in several years when we have eye wear
that slows AR objects like this to always be around
us. What kinds of small objects do you think would
benefit from being AR enhanced physical objects rather
than being purely physical.
all of which should haveplentyof
screenshots with meaningful captions. Web pages like this
can be very helpful later on in helping you build up a
portfolio of your work when you start looking for a job,
giving you something to point potential employers at, so
please put some effort into it.
Regarding citing models and sounds that you used but did not
create, my sample scene included these resources:
UFO model by hana -
https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model/273a556e078133532296d88107d065f6/UFO
UFO sound by Daniel Simion -
https://soundbible.com/2213-Alien-Spaceship-UFO.html
Cow Model by Max M -
https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model/288b4047-1c6b-43e5-9b76-eb14ff9152fa/Cow
Grey alien model by Tainted Angel -
https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model/c3c00f04-75b2-4500-a3e8-d0664c2be100/Alien-Grey
Roswell Logo from the Roswell New Mexico
site -
https://roswell-nm.gov/FormCenter/Convention-Civic-Center-9/Submit-a-Community-Event-53
You should also create a 5 minute YouTube video showing the
use of your application including narration with decent
audio quality. That video should be in a very obvious place
on your main project web page. Capturing video from a
smartphone is probably best, but you can also capture video
from a webcam. You can try to narrate while interacting but
you will most likely find its useful to do some editing
afterwards to tighten the video up. This video is helpful
for us to know which parts of your project work, and may be
useful in the future when you want to show off some of the
projects you created, but you can't get the code to compile
anymore or you don't have the hardware handy. Note that for
a 5 minute video your video should have 4 minutes and 55
seconds to 5 minutes of useful content - more or less is
bad.
Once you have your web page done, send the URL to
Andy and Ashwini before the deadline. We will respond to
this email as your 'receipt'.
We will be linking your web page to the course
notes so please send Andy a nice representative jpg
image/photo of your knickknack running, highlighting your
chosen location for the web. This should be named
p1.<your_last_name>.jpg and be roughly 1024 x 768 in
size.
Presenting the Project
An important part of creating AR applications is
getting feedback and using it to improve your design. This also
allows you to see how others approached the problem, and maybe
they solved some problems that you had issues with, and
vice-versa, so it helps everyone get better for the next
project.
We will be spending time in class for each person to show off
their work in a live demo either through streaming your phone to
the classroom wall (preferred) or streaming your laptop viewing
your knickknack through a webcam to the classroom wall.See the Week 5 and 6 notes for details.
