Individual reflections - Alexandru

 

Assignment 1

The first assignment was to create a marked based AR project. Our project was an educational geography app, which would display the country highlighted on the map, based on the flag showed by the user. The scope was limited to European countries.

In this project the main concepts learned were marker tracking and the purpose of augmenting a real object. The Vuforia engine provided the features needed to create this project. The ImageTarget object was used for the flag images, the ones that will be tracked. Inside the ImageTarget objects are the maps with their respective country highlighted, that will display on top of the tracked flags. For every country, there was one ImageTarget parent object, the flag, and their map child object.

As we were testing, we realized that some maps are more easily recognizable than other. More specifically flags that have an emblem, were more easily tracked than simple, solid colour flags. This is because those flags have more points from which it can correctly tracked. Lighting and reflections also had an impact on the tracking, but nonetheless, this taught me to be more mindful of the objects I choose to be tracked and the current limitation that tracking has on different objects.

This being the first assignment, the project was not something complex, but more like an introduction to what AR is and what to be expected next from the course. Because of the small size of the project, there was not a big workload to split, so the group worked mostly together.

Assignment 2

For the second assignment, the project was now a marker-less AR project. The project we decided to do was a portal to another dimension. We decided on doing a museum tour, showcasing warrior armors from different time periods. The technology used was AR Core with AR Foundation.

I worked on the script that makes the portal appear and on the masking of objects. Using shaders, the objects inside the dimension are only visible through the portal and inside the dimension. We had some problems with the assets not working properly with the shaders, so we had to change them a couple of times. Another problem was the plane tracking working poorly on our phones. This meant we could not place the portal to test the functionality. Even by following the official documentation, we could not fix this problem. Because of this we could test the project only inside the Unity engine.

We did not manage to implement everything we wanted, but we had a working portal which opens to a museum.

Assignment 3

The third assignment was the first VR project. We created a game in which you are a waiter in a restaurant, taking orders from customers. This project was the most comprehensive one.

Firstly, we implemented the hand controller functionality and the ability to pick food. For the food we created a spawner that spawns a random food item each time. This functionality had an error of spawning food infinitely which caused the game to crash. It took a lot of time, but we managed to fix it. For each food item a tag was added, which was used for the functionality of accepting an order. When the customer collides with the food item he orders, he disappears, and you get points. I was responsible for the food spawner and the customers accepting the orders.

This project ended up being my favorite. We had some problems with the version control deleting some of the commits, but even so, I had the most fun with this project.

Assignment 4

The fourth and last assignment was a choice between XR or VR. We decided to do a VR project again, because of how much we enjoyed the previous project. Unfortunately, this project did not go as smoothly.

Initially the idea was to create a puzzle game with hand gestures. We figured it would not be enough, so we decide to incorporate a maze-like horror aspect to it. The purpose was to have the player do some puzzles using hand tracking to escape from the monster following them. After some problems with the assets, we changed the maze to a more open space, a ruined city.

The biggest problem we encountered was to create a locomotion system using hand tracking. I was the one responsible for this. After many failed attempts, I managed to make a button on the left wrist which upon being pressed with the right hand, moves the character towards where it’s looking. This took a lot of time to fix so we simplified the puzzles. We changed the way you win the game, by adding a gun at the end and having to kill the monster, instead of just escaping.

This project was the most difficult, but was a good representation of the limitations locomotion has when using hand tracking instead of controllers.