Saturday 22nd July –

Well today could be likened to two steps forward and 1 step backwards.  My MacBook kept kept crashing, so I had to resort to my Windows desktop.  At first I was optimistic about installing the augmented reality software on it.  Unfortunately it was half way through the install that the big, ‘disk full’ sign appeared.  At this point I knew that I could no longer put off cleaning up my desktop PC.  I found an external hard drive and cleared some disk space.  After numerous attempts I finally managed to install the required software.

However still nothing ran smoothly! A combination of slow running speeds and user error, meant, that a job that should have taken around 2 hours to complete, took around 7 hours!

it wasn’t all bad news though, I managed to augment 2 pages of my Barcelona Graffiti book.  I’ve still got some fine tuning to do but I’m pretty happy with the results.  As I didn’t finish till late tonight I haven’t recorded any videos but I have created the work.  My aim is to show progress maybe tomorrow if things run more smoothly.  I’m not completely disillusioned with today.  I’ve still managed to create some pretty ‘neat’ animations that work with my book. So it’s been very frustrating with computer crashes but not all bad.

What Did I Learn?

ChatGPT taught me how to add a line of code to enable Processing to write .png files to a designated folder.  I’ll not go into the detail of why this is important.  However, if I want to import animations to augment in reality it is essential.

I learned that not all augmented reality programs are created equal and there’s not any one program that is perfect.  It seems you really can not have it all when it comes to augmented reality programs.  For example, some programs will need a dedicated app to run the augmented reality experiences, while others rely on social media apps. Some programs will support video while others won’t.  Some apps will allow multiple experiences and multiple target tracking, while others won’t.  The important thing is to choose a program that covers your main criteria and try to find a ‘workaround’ for everything else.  I also learned to check on the protocols regarding file types for animation sequence imports.  Believe me when I say this is crucial! Otherwise, like me you can end up wasting lots of time wondering why your animations won’t play.

What Did I Actually Achieve?

I successfully created an animated text sequence with transparent background that tracks to the first page of my book.  I also created a generative art style animation that tracks to the second page of my book.  Now that I have my computer resources in place I’m actually quite excited about tomorrow.