Project 1 - CS 428

Omar Walweel

In this project you are going to see 2 cubes that through the app I made, you will see the 2 cubes change to 2 cubes that hold information. The top of the first cube will be Willis’s tower with people, trees, street, and streetlights. On one side of the cube, you will see the date and time in Chicago. The other side will show the weather at Chicago. The third side is name of the building. And the fourth side is Chicago’s flag. The second cube holds the same idea. The top is Big Ben with birds, bridge, Ferris wheel, and United Kingdom’s flag. One side of the cube is the data and time in London, the other side is the weather there, the third side ais the name of the building, and the fourth side is London’s flag. The app can be used on desktop and on iOS devices. All the app needs to show these two cubes is open the app and point them at 2 cubes in real life.


Willi’s tower: For Willi’s tower, I created streetlights and the street. The tower is in the city, and city is all streets and streetlights. That’s why I created the two models. For the sound, I made it as people talking. This is because there are people in the model, so the sound represents them talking. This attraction place is important to me because I live in Chicago and visited the tower.


Big Ben: For Big Ben, I created The United Kingdom flag and small bridge. The flag represents the country this building is in, which is UK, and the bridge represents a nearby park that has a bridge people can walk on, like how the bridge I made look like. I chose this building because I used to watch british movies and shows before and seen this building many times. So it is something that I used to see a lot.



If you want to see how this looks in practice and hear me talk about this project, visit this youtube link: https://youtu.be/9hm_wXB-Aco

If you want to try the project by yourself, here is the GitHub page: https://github.com/donut321/CS428-Project1.git

This looks great right? But what does it mean for the future? Will this technology change our perceptions of reality in the future? For this project, the focus was to display places on a cube using AR. This is an interesting and useful idea and will increase in popularity in the future as a technology like this is useful for people as it shows us what a location looks like before we visit it. This type of technology is already in use in applications that we use every day like maps or social media apps like Instagram. For example, google maps lets you on your phone view the area as if you are there and lets you walk around the area to discover it. This is cool, but the thing missing is you don’t feel like you are there. This is the reason why companies are investing heavily in AR glasses. The vision in the future is that people will be able to view things as if they are right next to it or in it. This is also the same technology that Google Lens and Google Translate use. Being able to walk around, translating texts in real-time, talking to people as if they are right in front of you, or having a place replicated to make you feel as if you are in it will change a lot of things and solve many problems. Another example would when an employee at a company with a lot of sensitive machines detects a problem, they can put on a pair of VR glasses, visualize the issue using AR, and fix it using what they see in the glasses. No need to send a repair team into the lab. Coupled with other technologies such as artificial intelligence for image recognition, companies can optimize the creation, monitoring, and maintenance of complex systems. Another example would be how we use maps. Currently, we must put our phone on the dashboard on a holder to hold the phone. This is a problem because it can distract the user with things such as notifications, unclear display, unable to quickly glance on the map, etc. which could be dangerous in some situations. AR glasses can solve this issue by letting showing the user the map on (for example) the windshield so the driver can focus on both the map and on the map without looking at the phone. This is one suggestion, and some companies already implemented such AR technology in some devices but is still a young technology where it has some bugs. But in the future, technology like this would be very popular and help a lot of people, and possible save people from accidents. Last example would be, which is what this project is about, projecting something on (for example) on the table. Say a company want to construct a building and wants to see how it would look like. They can use AR to display the building along with everything around it on the table to give a quick and clear look on how this place would look like with this building after construction.