Alex Fast

Final Project

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1G512Kak-90aPgE4sBcCQy6R9brg28tzJb5KrnSbPOio/edit?usp=sharing

AR Memory


I decided to focus on a special memory: the first time I told my fiancee that I loved her. I made a 3D skating rink and exported it as an .fbx to Unity where I made it a bit more realistic. I used the VideoPlayer Prefab to attach four videos onto four different planes. Each video is a different video taken by either me or Kristen either a few minutes or moments away before I told her I loved it. This exercise served as both a good exploration of ARKit and a good way to impress by fiancee. 






REIFY NY
My boss is not a big fan of AR. “It’s too much of a novelty thing,” he frequently says, and he’s not wrong. A majority of the apps that I see for AR right now are pure novelties that rely on the nascent nature of the technology to engage users. This is detrimental to the tech as a whole because I think it will lead to users becoming bored with AR before they can see it’s true potential. For example, an iPhone 8 user who is pushed to download an AR game will get bored with it and begin to associate AR with quick, empty games that are mere vehicles to show off a tech. Remember how Knack became a laughing stock for the Playstation?

When I think of an idea that involves AR now, the first thing that I ask myself is, “Is this novel?” Does the addition to AR of this app enhance the users experience in a way that others don’t? Does it make a users life easier? For the AR app that Jaycee and I created – ReifyNY – I think that the answer is yes on all fronts.

The notion of a walking tour app isn’t too original. After all, there are plenty of tour compendiums that exist, audio guided tours of museums being the largest example. I do firmly believe though that AR could actually be used to enhance these experiences though. While a guided audio tour can provide a lot of information, it doesn’t engage the visual sense at all. It also relies on a users rapt focus to transform them to a different place. Both of these “problems” are solved with Augmented Reality.

We set ReifyNY in MetroTech Center with the goal of providing our users with a history of the area, a history of which they may not be all too familiar. Our first augment is an onboarding. We inform our users of what they’re about to experience and give them a small map so they can get a sense of the path that they’re going to be walking.


The second augment is a brief documentation of who was here before Brooklyn was Breuckelen: the Lenape Indians.

The third augment is a detailed background of the church on the northwest corner of the park.


The fourth augment is a brief telling of how the area was gentrified and commercialized in the late 20th century.



The fifth and final augment gets users familiar with what can be seen in Metro Tech Center today: various art installations, concerts, etc.
In terms of the creation of this project, Jaycee and I split the work in half. Jaycee was responsible for the augments dealing with the church and the contemporary space while I was responsible for the onboarding, the Lenape augment and the commercialization augment. Jaycee goes over the difficulties she encountered in her blog post so I’ll focus solely on mine.

The largest difficulty I encountered in the process was scripting by far as this is my largest weak point with Unity. Making sure the animations the animations were triggering properly took a good long while to figure out but once I learned how to do one, the others fell into place without too much difficulty.


The only changes I would make would really be about the assets. Due to the fact that I’m a broke graduate student, I don’t have the supplemental income to spend on assets so I’m forced to rely on the free assets in the asset store. In an ideal world, I would make more convincing scenes for the Lenape/commercialization augment: there would be animals and more realistic Lenape and there would be a larger variety of buildings.

Overall though I’m proud of what we did. I think we created the beginnings of an app that doesn’t rely on AR as a novelty but utilizes in a way that makes it necessary for the app.


AR ASSIGNMENT
Here's a link to the slideshow I put together tomorrow for class



INDEXICAL STORYTELLING:

The opening scene from David Lynch's Blue Velvet which can be considered a visual example of indexical storytelling:



The films of Mike Nichols which can be considered auditorial indexical storytelling:

The Graduate

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf




AR POST:


AR is going to change a lot of different industries. As we've already seen from the first assignment we did in class, there are countless opportunities afforded us by this nascent technology. Luckily, this first assignment has us narrowing the scope of things down a bit.

One of my favorite movies is 2001: A Space Odyssey. In my room are two different representations of the work. The first is the movie barcode featured below.


(Every frame of the film condensed into one barcode. by Moviebarcode)

The other is a glow in the dark poster featured at the top of the post. The image on the left is the image during the day and the right side is in the absence of light. I decided to augment this image because I think it would add another level of dimensionality to an already multi-dimensional poster.
Now that I knew what I was going to augment I needed to figure out how to augment it. I wanted to treat the project as if I were a marketer for the film. If I were passing by this poster on the street, how could I use AR to enhance the story without showing a simple trailer for the film (although I feel that to be just as viable a usage of AR).

One of the lines that always stuck with me was the line Dave Bowman was heard uttering when he entered the monolith: "My god! It's full of stars." The allure and mystery of the statement keeps with the movie's vague ending and I wanted that to be featured as to draw people in. Once they - hopefully - were, I wanted to continue to draw them in with the Stargate sequence which gives the allusion of entering a space they've never seen before. The AR experience ends with the video expanding very quickly into the image of Dave's mouth frozen in fear; a happy accident that was more a result of the tech's inabilities than a creative thought.

The Blippar tech is great for what it is, but there certainly are limitations to the free software. For example, I wanted the words to fade in and out but had to settle for making the text small and large. I also tried to upload custom transparent background mp4's to no avail.

With that said, I'm still happy with the product I came up with which is featured below. (Sorry for the vertical video).



Assignment One

I could use a new book. Let's see what Barnes and Noble has to offer.




Wow...that's a lot to choose from. What do I feel like reading about?



I'm getting older, maybe I'll read what the worst thing for me to eat is. 



Yea. That makes sense. 



I don't anything about this stuff. Maybe I'll check it out.



Huh, there's a law school around the corner in case I want to pursue this as a career!



NBA2k18 comes out this week. Maybe I'll learn more about basketball.




Oh, shit! And there's a Big3 tourney happening this week! I'll get this book. THANKS AR!!!

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