XRD - group 5

  Week 39 - Markerless AR assignment wrap up Contributor: Ionut Our group met at the XR lab this week to finish the Markerless AR assignment. As discussed the previous week, we split our work so now we had to merge our implemented features and record a demo for Thursday's presentation once we had everything working. During the implementation of the Solar System, I spent time making sure that the ratio between the scale of the planets and their rotation/movement speed was making sense and was as close to reality as possible. For the scale of the planets, I have used a guide you can see here whilst their rotation speed was taken from here . The main challenges we encountered developing this assignment were with GitHub LFS and the Unity Render Pipeline rendering the Solar System materials pink. The pink materials were overcome by trial and error. Assets used: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/planets-of-the-solar-system-3d-90219 Youtube Demo: https://youtube.com/s...

  Week 38 - Markerless Lab hours Contributor: Ionut During week 38 we started working on the Markerless AR assignment, ‘LeARning through AR’. Our idea was to recreate the solar system in Unity and instantiate it on a ground plane using ARCore. With the solar system instantiated we would be able to walk amongst the planets and click a planet to have a UI popup with information about that planet.  We started by setting up the project and repository together. This took a while as we had some setbacks with Git LFS and its account quota. After setting up the project we have split the tasks as such: Ionut will create the Solar System in Unity, Karlo will create an AR cursor/pointer by using Raycasts and Vlad will take care of the UI pop-ups for each planet.

  Week 37 - Markerless AR class Contributor: Karlo In this class we have been exploring the workings of markerless AR. In the short hand meaning we have learned some of the systems in our everyday phones that provide the markerless AR with the full functionality. Furthermore, we explored what we would need to make the markerless AR work with Unity and that is ARCore, Vuforia, ARkit or AR Foundation. Each of those alternatives offer pretty much the same functionalities like motion tracking, environmental understanding and light estimation. One of the most important features from the previously mentioned ones is the environmental understanding that offers plane finding and feature points in the real world through the device’s camera. It's also important that the feature points and plane detection is affected by a variety of real world effects like the light conditions and the textures of the surfaces, as well as the amount of possible feature points. Additionally, light estimation ca...

  Week 36 - Marker-based AR Lab Hours Contributors: Karlo To continue the work of the last week our primary goal was to implement collision between the player projectiles and enemies getting hit by those projectiles. This was a very hideous process as we were struggling on how to exactly implement such physics. After a lot of trial and error, we have tried to isolate the problems so we wanted to run Unity in the debug mode, with which we also had some problems, until we discovered Logcat that can print out logs from an Android device to Unity. In the moment of realising that it would take us a lot more time to develop an envisioned project, we have resorted to a much simpler idea that included multiple image targets and models of cars that can be scaled up and down by the pinch of fingers on your screen. As before the used assets can be found in the Github Readme file. Another important note is that we have worked together throughout the whole process of the last two weeks. This as...

  Week 35 - Introduction to AR Contributors: Karlo This week we have been exploring how image-targets work with the Vuforia engine. From that we have realised that there could be multiple image targets recognized at the same time so therefore we came to the idea of creating a space shooter type game. The process that we took was to have two image targets, one acting as a player and another one acting as an arena with enemies. Important note to add is that in our group no one has had a game development course prior to this course so we were still trying to catch up with Unity development by itself. Furthermore, we have met-up and tried to code and debug our coding process that was going great until we ran into some small problems that were limiting us from continuing. Those problems were mostly from the lack of knowledge of Unity. Another thing is that we have used some code from the internet, and we have also used Unity Assets that we found for free in Unity marketplace. More about...