Week 1: Idea and Kickoff

原文连接:http://durchblickapp.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/week-1-idea-and-kickoff/

Week 1: Idea and Kickoff

February 28, 2010

Vision

A clear vision helps focusing on the goals: Human’s face as a digital business card. The idea is to augment the reality in realtime around a person’s face with information corresponding to this particular person, e.g. during lecture hold an iPhone in the air and watch the tag cloud of the lecture’s blog popping up around him.

A normal shot with the camera of the iPhone of a person.

A mockup of a full screen iPhone AR app with a clickable tag cloud of this person around the head.

Thanks to Raphael Moser for taking the nice photos.

Outline

Every Computer Science student at the Bern University of Applied Sciences Engineering and Information Technology does a project “Project 2” (in German) with the goals to

• manage a project,
• gain technical expertise in the topic and
• prepare for the final thesis “Bachelor Thesis” (in German).

I proposed this as an own topic. The main goal is to evaluate the feasibility and implement as much proof of concepts as possible towards the vision. The project can be successful even if the result is that it’s not possible for some encountered and documented reasons. It’s important that it will be self-contained and has a conclusion in the end. It may be the foundation for the bachelor thesis to go further towards the vision. I’m very happy that professor Urs Künzler will mentor this project with his expertise and innovation in this area.

Augmented Reality

My major is Computer Perception & Virtual Reality (CPVR) and I really enjoy the lectures given by the very bright professors. It’s an area that will matter in the future and it’s fascinating. Especially the lectures about Augmented Reality (AR) caught my attention and I think it will be one of the “the next big things”. I tried to write a short definition of AR and came up with this:

“Augment the perceptible reality by directly embedding computer generated information.”

And in German:

«Die wahrnehmbare Realität wird durch Computer generierte Informationen angereichert, indem diese direkt darin eingebettet werden.»

iPhone Platform

Apple’s iPhone is a smartphone with excellent capabilities for this kind of applications. It has a wide variety of in- and output possibilities and is a computer in the pocket. Yet it’s a very restricted platform. Despite these challenges I chose it due to personal interest.

Durchblick

I was fed up with english buzzwords so I almost randomly chose a german project name: Durchblick—Durch means through and Blick means gaze and together it means something around “to be in the know”. Ten characters is a good length, it’s generic, has no umlauts and the prefix for classes could be a simple “DB”.

Preliminary Work

I put a lot of work during my free time since fall ’09 into getting on the iPhone platform. It was absolute mandatory to get over these barriers before the project started.

The toolchain used for development (i.e. mainly Xcode, Interface Builder, gcc, gdb and Instruments) is very sophisticated. Note that it’s Mac OS X only. I really learned it by just using it for daily development with C/C++ during my mid-studies.

First I’ve freshen up my C then self-taught Objective-C. It’s the programming language all the frameworks (i.e. mainly Cocoa with Foundation and UIKit) used are written in. I started to like the elegance immediately and I’m still enjoying coding with the well established design patterns (i.e. mainly Model-View-Controller (MVC), Target-Action, Delegation, Key-Value Coding and Observing (KVC/KVO) and Notification) used throughout the Software Development Kit (SDK).

The iPhone environment makes it hard to test the applications (apps) on real hardware. I had to enroll in a paid developer program, sign contracts, fax documents and go through a jungle of certificates and code signing which is very time-consuming.

My experience for now includes a lot of reading and writing example code, creating an app for the seminar “Computer Science Seminar” (in German) which does Delaunay Triangulation (YouTube link), personal side projects, a recent customer app on behalf of illuBits involving Data Matrix scanning and a current project on the upcoming iPad with one of the best-known design agencies in the world.

Meetings

About every four weeks a meeting with my mentor is planned to check the status and decide the direction if there were unsolvable problems.

Protocol of the kickoff meeting on 26 Feb:

• Setup meetings every four weeks.
• Show a draft of the Software Requirements Specification (SRS) in the meeting on 26 Mar.
• Try to face important technical challenges upfront.

About the Blog

The blog documents the attempt at creating an Augmented Reality iPhone App in 16 weeks as a part-time studies project and I plan to blog every week about the done work. The content of the blog entries will form the SRS and Project Report. This will prevent me from coding 15 weeks and then ask myself in the 16th what I have done and should document.

Despite my mother tongue is Swiss German and my studies are bilingual (German and French) I write in English because I plan to work and/or study in a foreign country in the future and use this project as a reference and gain experience.

Comments are disabled but don’t hesitate to talk to me directly or shoot me an e-mail at schar9 AT bfh DOT ch . Please give feedback and tell me what’s good and what’s not.

If you like please consider subscribing this blog in your news reader or check back every week.

(完)