Week 3 Review

Desktop Fireworks from Saqoosha on Vimeo.

Description:
people hope their lives becoming more fresh by using new technology. They are not only satisfied with their wealthy life, but also
want to improve their lives, no matter mental demands or material demands. It being partly responsible for upgrading
new productions to be functionable and sustainable. As a new technology age, ARTOOLKIT would be a high-performance technology.


Technology:
The desktop fireworks has been created by using the ARTOOLKIT technology, users just need to print out the A/R code from their site, hold it up to your webcam and voila, instant virtual fireworks came out, great way to get the public playing with this new technology. designer
used Flash and ARToolkit (the ported version of ARToolKit) and Papervision3D.
Visual C++ plays an important role in the whole process as well.

Project Process:
1. The camera captures video of the real world and sends it to the computer.
2. Software on the computer searches through each frame for any square shapes.
3. if it found a square, the software uses some mathmatics to automaticlly calculate the positon and orientation between webcam and the black square.
4. once the webcam knows the position, a computer graphics model is drawn from that same position.
5. this model is drawn on top of the video of the real world and so appears stuck on the square marker.
6. the final output is shown back in screen, so when the user looks through the display they see grahics overlaid on the real world.

here is the sketch for the process design:



Project dissemination & usefulness:
ARTOOLKIT has been exploited as a bran-new technology in resent years, more and more productions have been designed by using this technology in educational field, economic field, enviromental field and so on. Taking game design by using this software as a good example, the fresh technology which players never met before could help game developers to create a huge benifit. If we change the content from fireworks to alphabet or mathmatics, it could be used as an educational materials to teach childrens in the most interesting way in the future. Most importantly, people only work with a few softwares, they do not need to use other materials, it has significances to energy saving and environmental protection.

Relevance:
The relevance of taking this course in three reasons. Firstly, it created in a interactive way. secondly, it largely saved materials. For example, users only need to print out the square marker or save the images of each square marker into PSP or MP4 to play with the game. Constrate with other games, it does not need any handle controls to play with the game, which saved materials indeed. Thirdly, papers could be recyling after the game, this is the proper way to reduce enviromental pollution in a sense. This is exactly how to achieve sustainability and interaction.

Reflection:
It inspired me to dig this technology deeper and deeper, looking forward to see more productions created by using ARTOOLKIT technology.
As a user, i know how to take actions to save energy. On the other hand, designers could notice what the users truely needs, it is the other way to save materials too.