Over the course of this semester I have completed and learned many unexpected things. Going into this class I wanted to develop a game of some sort. However, the team I ended up joining decided to create an augmented reality app instead. This led me down a path of technologies and design types I was unfamiliar with.
When finalizing the idea we had envisioned I expected we had expectations that were higher than anything we could likely achieve. At the time I thought augmented reality was more ironed out and advanced further than it actually was. This meant I expected less hurdles to climb. Our actual progress produced a design that I think is similar enough to our envisioned idea to be proud of. My biggest dislike is that we can only use the Chrome Canary browser and not any browser. I believe given some time this technology will be much more common. These were some issues I wish we could have discovered sooner. I’m not sure we would have found these issues with just normal research either, I think we needed to start implementing code to find them.
Expectations:
However, these issues we ran into can be viewed as constraints and these constraints made us get more creative with the ways we were implementing the project. Instead of trying to make everything from scratch using technologies we didn’t understand, we started using well documented code from examples and piecing them together and modifying them until we got something we wanted. I believe this would be the only way we could have gotten the augmented reality to work at all. We are not yet capable of doing the work involved with 3D modeling with code and using cameras to recognize planes and surfaces to latch models onto.
I believe creative computing is amazing. People want to use things made by people in creative computing. In my spare time I want to play video games or something unique that was made by somebody doing creative computing. It is also the type of programming and work that I would prefer to do as it lets me have less limits and guidelines. I feel as though I’m happiest doing creative computing compared to the conventional computer science type projects.
I believe this course is carried out in a manner that I really enjoy and I feel as though other computer science students would. The low course load, outside of the project, and long time to create a project is amazing because it allows to work on this project when we aren’t doing projects from other classes. Also, the ability to change and modify our project along the way was the best part because we would never have been able to complete what we had originally set out to do. Knowing that we had flexibility made me very happy and not stressed about my grade like I would have been otherwise.
The papers we read for our class presentation was my least favorite part. Not everybody’s papers were “equivalent”. Mine was very short and was extremely straightforward, so I had a hard time making a presentation that felt on par with some of the other presentations. I felt as though I had written and used every viable piece of information from the article. However, I really liked my article’s topic and I was happy I chose it. I found it to be very interesting and helpful for this class and my future career.
A very important takeaway from my article. Iteration helps build success:
The two themes of this class were liveness and ambiguity. These were my biggest struggle out of everything. To me ambiguity is very broad and hard for me to grasp. However, liveness is simple, but I felt as though that related too much to a performance in most cases. Our group decided to go for ambiguity more so than liveness as we wanted people to be able to express themselves, but not necessarily do it in front of people or “live”. We chose to do this with art by letting users draw images and then upload them to a location. This is ambiguous because we are letting users draw anything they want. People who go and view these drawings may interpret them completely different than the artist may have intended.
In our case this can be art to somebody. Maybe it means something to me, the artist, but not to somebody else:
Overall I believe I would recommend this class to anybody in the computer science department. It allows you to learn what you want, has a realistic timeline and due dates, you get exposed to the design world, and it is altogether a fun and enjoyable class. My biggest takeaway from this class is constraints. The world of computing is filled with constraints at this point and you have to learn how to adapt and either change our direction or try and overcome the constraints. These constraints will ultimately change and dictate your projects final version and outcome. These won’t always be bad outcomes either. Sometimes constraints force you to be creative and come up with new ideas and designs you never would have otherwise imagined.