Embedded Files
Mark Chen, mchen200
CS 428 - Homework 5 (Week 5 and 6)
Project Review 1
For the first project file that I looked at was “The Great Gatsby”. The book is a classic that I had to read for high school and the book is written by Scott Fitzgerald. The group who worked on this project was Mansur Shawabkeh and Michael Lederer. Going through their website, I was easily able to find their Github and their instructions were clear. I was able to find their front cover image and back cover image on their GitHub right away. Uploading the project on Unity was fine. It took about a good fifteen minutes to extract all the files from the zip folder that I downloaded from their GitHub.
Upon opening the project on Unity, I was met with two red errors about their videos not loading properly. However, When I ran their project, it was able to run properly. The augmentation was able to respond well to the front cover image target. There are a lot of distinct things on the front cover. Moving on to the augmentation, their title was good, because it was three-dimensional, and the color was green. For those who have not read the book, green is one of the themes of the book. There were a lot of objects that just scream The Great Gatsby such as money, alcohol, pearls, gold bars, and fancy car. The animations were also cool to, where the car is spinning like how Gandalf did in The Lord of the RIngs: the Fellowship of the Ring when Gandalf confronts Saruman, but Saruman overpowers him (Car spinning is shown in the Gyazo gif above compared to the second picture above of Gandalf spinning). I also liked how Mansur and Michael put Leonardo DiCaprio as their spokesperson, since DiCaprio stars in the movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby. The AR button on the front cover works well; however, you have to hold the AR button for the spokesperson to talk which gets pretty tiring when holding a picture of the book cover up to a laptop camera.
One thing that I don’t like on the front cover is the lighting. The lighting is very bright which makes it hard to see the colors on each of the objects. Another thing I do not like about the project are the size of objects, particularly the house. The house is very small compared to objects such as the car, wine bottle (Shown in first picture below)
Onto the back cover, I am met with information on the book which includes title, author, publication year, and number of pages. When I press the left AR button, reviews pop up on the book. I don't really like this because the words of the reviews sort of get blended in with the words from the back cover and making it hard to read. Pressing the right AR button brings up a video player with a groupmates’ video review of the book. I think the video player is too small, and not very effective. Overall, I think Mansur’s and Michael’s augmentation of the book, The Great Gatsby was fairly effective with the front cover and not so much with the back cover. (Shown in the second picture below)
Front Cover
Back Cover with Reviews and Video Review
Project Review 2
The next project I looked into was Fahrenheit 451 which was created by Jake Terhark. Scrolling through the project list, Fahrenheit 451 really caught my eye. I have never read the book, but the cover image looked very interesting. I saw people putting fire on a pile of stuff that is on fire, and I was hoping that the fire was animated, and I was not let down. The animations of the fire are shown in the Gyazo gif above. Anyways, getting to the GitHub was fine. However, I could not find a front cover image and a back cover image on the GitHub, so I had to hunt down the pictures in the Assets folder. Opening up the project on Unity was fine. I had to go through the Assets folder to open up the scene. There were no errors in the console which is good. I ran the project and it ran okay.
The camera was able to find the front cover image target very well. The front cover is shown in the first picture below. On the front cover was two armored men spraying fire in a pit of fire of wood. I really liked how the flames physically move in comparison to the AR camera. So if you moved the AR camera downwards, some of the flames would move down too. The AR button on the front cover work properly. The spokesperson “talks” when I press the AR button. The volume is pretty low thought. Changing the language also works. I really like the font of the 3D text for the title and author. I also like the animations of the fire. Other than that, the scene was simple, not cluttered, and very eye catching. The lighting was good as well. Nothing was too bright or too dark. The lighting felt proper for the book. The option to change languages changed the language to Spanish.
The camera was able to find the back cover image target well. On the back cover, the title, author, publication year. language and page number is shown. I like how the information follows the camera instead of being in one location. The AR buttons are fairly difficult to press or get them to respond to clicks. The arrow buttons are a really nice visual aspect of the project where I am able to cycle through reviews. I think the AR buttons have meaningful pictures to them that describe the purpose of them.
Some things that Jake did that I thought were great ideas and that I would have implemented in my project is having a background for the texts as shown in the reviews and apply it to my front cover title and author and back cover information. This would allow users to augment a book anywhere. Sometimes the place you are trying to augment the book makes it difficult to see the texts, so by having that background, it allows users to see it anywhere as shown in the second and third picture below. Another thing that Jake did that I liked was button placements. The placement of his buttons felt as if the augmentation was on a tablet with meaningful symbols on them, and that is something I could have improved on during my work on the project. Overall, I think Jake did a very effective job on the augmentation of Fahrenheit 451.
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