Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

On day 1 of presentations, this project seemed (in my opinion) one of the better ones. When group 8 came up to do their presentations, aesthetically it looked cool, so I thought that it would be a cool one for me to download and try out for myself, so I did.

I got the program opened and compiled just fine. I used an iPad to display the picture of the cover and back and my initial impressions of this group 8 project are very good. The models looked accurate for the main characters of the series, plus the music and sound effects sounded pretty good. The streetlamps next to the Dementors were great. I loved the fact that the lights flickered on and off in different orders. It was a nice design choice and cool thing to see. The Dementors looked great as well with their animations. Although a little goofy looking with how it flew around, it was thematic and appropriate that the lights flickered on and off next to the Dementors. Also, it was fantastic seeing the title change with the language change button. I personally thought it functioned well.

Using the button for the spokesperson worked great too in the beginning but for some reason the functionality started dwindling and the button started working a handful of times. To be fair this is almost expected considering how finicky an AR button can be.

The spokesperson themselves, I thought, had fine sound quality, but it maybe could have been a little louder as well as it was a little hard to understand her. The music was a good volume though and I think it can act as a basis to bend the volumes of the other sound effects towards. Unfortunately, I thought the spokesperson wasn’t loud enough and opposite to that, the buzzing of the lights were a tad too loud for my taste as well.

Going back to the visual side of things, tracking of the front cover was surprisingly excellent in my opinion. I tilted the screen drastically away from the camera, and the cover still tracked and displayed the models. I rotated it to see if it tracked it in any corner and still, the models never popped out of existence. Moving the image too far, however, made my camera/application not track it anymore and this is my main (but not that serious) gripe about the application. I thought that the models should have been place more on top of the book cover than it was. The models were super far off the side of the front cover and it was pretty dang awkward to get a good view of them in a practical way.

On the backside, I think this was a very functional and clean part of the project. The buttons again were just a LITTLE bit finicky to use but they didn’t jitter in and out of videos making them stutter, which I consider a plus on the less annoying aspect of things. The ratings they used and took snippets from, were also clean, crisp and not fuzzy. I though the text (as far as I can assume) for one of the Hindi review translation looked weird and fuzzy. For the video review, the image was fine but again, I thought the sound volume definitely could have been better. The music just overpowered the voices in the videos for me.

All in all I still think this was one of the better projects, but the model placing/scaling and the sound could have been tweaked a little bit better.