Processing Conclusion

When I got the brief I didn’t quite know what processing was but after some research and our first lesson it was clear we would be using code. Therefore I become very weary of processing because I feel that I am not that good at code and this looked quite complex. This fear also had an impact on my idea generation because I didn’t know what was possible but further research I found that augmented reality (AR) could be done. This interested me a lot because of a game on my phone called AR defender which I was amazed by because of a little image being able to have a graphic lay over it. Once I had decided that AR could be produced I though to get an idea of how the code works I started with a QR sketch to read a QR linked to my website.

Once I had a QR sketch working I found and tried a number of AR libraries that failed to work for me. No matter what I tried they would not work for me, so I decided to look on Vimeo and YouTube and I found a video of someone getting an AR library called NyAR2 that I had found but didn’t get to work on a Mac. This fuelled my determination to getting the library to work on a Mac. I then searched the web trying to find how it worked and I found two lines of code (on a Spanish blog) that got it to work on a Mac. I then translated the page to get a understanding of how this code worked.

Now I had an AR sketch working that used the default markers and placed a 3D cube over the top of the markers it was time to develop my own. Therefore I used the images of the default markers as a template and designed my own. Then by searching the internet I found a website that created marker files from images. Along this journey I had a few obstacles to create the patt file but after looking at the file name I realised that when saving the files I need to re-name them to create the right format. Once I had created my own patt files I felt that I had triumphed because understanding how the patt files work mean that you understand the way AR works.

Once I fully understood how AR and the markers worked the next obstacle was placing a video over the top of the marker instead of a graphic. This needed further research, and after researching video playback using processing I found POGG. This is the use of the OGG video file using processing to play the video file. After practicing with POGG I looked at my sketch and worked out how I could integrate the POGG code with the AR code. After several tries I successfully stitched the code together and placed video over the top of the marker instead of the 3D cube. It then took some modification of code to make the video display properly.

After completing my sketch I felt that it was missing something, I thought it didn’t look interactive and that it wouldn’t get people attention in stores. Therefore I added an image over the top of the capture to show people where to point the card. This gave the sketch an interface also I had modified my markers further and they needed to be in a certain position to be notice so this added guidance for the user. The after some advice from Seb of how to make the image be there when a marker is not see and when a marker is seen it disappears I was told to use a Boolean (something that we hadn’t covered in class). After researching what a Boolean was I found out that it has a true and false statement in it, I thought this sounded familiar to some code I already had which was the marker detector. Therefore I modified the marker detector by adding a true and false statement on the end. This statement worked by using the true statement for if you see the win or lose marker don’t load anything, then if you don’t see a marker at all load the point frame.

The way that I created my sketch by researching other sketches and stitching it together I feel that I have grasped a wider understanding of how the code works. I say this because I feel that if I had just copied a sketch and tweaked it I wouldn’t understand it as well. I feel that by getting AR to work, integrating film playback and creating my own markers I have a much better understanding of how AR in processing works.

Looking back on my project and how it has gone I have some new views on my skills and what is driven me to create an AR interaction. These views include…

• I feel that I now have more confidence with code
• Processing is something that I have confidence to pursue further because I find it so interesting and rewarding
• I find it interesting how changing a few figures can change the whole look and feel of a sketch and the elements within it
• I want to explore processing further due to Aaron Kobin using it in his work and I find his work so interesting
• Having a professional of the field like Seb there to help use through the process was useful because of his knowledge and class demonstrations.