First Steps into Augmented Reality

The first step is usually the toughest but most important one. After we have decided on building an Augmented Reality Instructional Manual, we set out to build a basic AR app. This basic app would only be able to place an object on the screen and would serve as a template for us to add our own features to.

As Wei Bin was in charge of the development of the app, he went through CodeAcademy’s guide to Java so he would be able to better understand the language that will be used to code our app. Then, as he had no prior knowledge in app development and AR, he looked up online tutorials on how to build a basic android AR app using ARCore and Android studio. However, as those guides seem to be outdated, he faced multiple bugs along the way and the app would not even compile properly. After a long 2 days of googling and looking at online tutorial for bug fixes, he finally manage to get a solution and got the AR app to work properly.

Initial Designs

Choy Boy created some designs on how the app might look like:

Introduction to Machine Learning

The learning curve for machine learning is inherently very steep as it requires a good background in Python, of which Tensorflow is written on. Tensorflow is a Software Development Kit (SDK) for machine learning offering hundreds of configurations where developers can tweak based on their project. Machine learning is used from audio translation to natural language processing to object detection.

For the purpose of this project, as Jian Xian is in charge of the machine learning, he focused on object detection where he needed the app to know that the object is in the field of view. To begin, he had to setup my development environment in Ubuntu as it is much more convenient to program in a Unix system. After a few days, he had set up the environment and had begun reading on the process of machine learning.