Wednesday 19th July –
I cannot believe how quickly the time is passing! It’s already day 7 and I’m now a third of the way through my 21 day challenge! Already I’m feeling much more confident than when I first started. As I continue to master the basics, I need to consider the type of assets I’d like to create to hide in the real world. I also need to work out how I can fund a new MacBook! Today my laptop drove me literally nuts! Every time I attempted to launch something in my augmented reality software, my MacBook crashed and restarted! I was ‘tearing my hair out’. Luckily I did manage to understand behaviours which was the lesson for today. This is where a particular action is assigned to an asset in the software. In other words if you have say an image of a ball you can make make the ball spin with a tap, or it might bounce if you approach it in augmented reality space. Below is a video of the project I made today. When a the image in my Barcelona Graffiti book is found a small scene appears with a sun, trees and an owl. Although the actual screen tap is not visible in the video it is evidenced by the the enlargement of the sun coupled with the owl flapping it’s wings and flying. Once the owl has finished the animated flying sequence, the trees are programmed to spin.
Flying Owl Forest Sequence
What Did I Learn?
I learned that my MacBook Pro is very ‘poorly’ – so I definitely need a new one. I also learned about assigning behaviours to animated 3d objects. I really like this software and in the short term I may have to ‘ditch’ my Meta Spark software in order to free up disk space to run my preferred software more smoothly.
What Did I Actually Achieve?
I achieved a video short with a number of animated objects from the tutorial and I am becoming much more familiar with the user interface. I am looking forward to my next tutorial tomorrow because hopefully from there I can begin designing augmented reality experiences for my second Barcelona graffiti book. I even managed to make contact with ’Engineered Arts’ – the company behind the robot Ameca. I did this as part of my primary research for my research paper. I leave today feeling optimistic apart from my lack of computer power.