Charles Njoroge's Journal

Activity Log

1/28 3-8pm: Articles on the importance of VR in education and training for students and jobs.

1/29 3-5 pm: Went over blender tutorials and videos to learn more about 3d modeling software that's available for free

1/29 6 -7pm Looked through unreal engine demos and feature list (Will go over tutorials)

2/3 12 - 4pm Installed Unreal Engine 4 on desktop machine and went over tutorials about the user interface. Worked through creating a virtual reality space and watched a tutorial on how to create a forest using the engine. Working on a physics simulation ball

2/4 3 - 8 pm Worked on playing around with the marketplace in unreal engine 4 and tried to integrate free worlds into my VR space. Had a couple of software incompatibility issues (Some things bought on the marketplace are not forward compatible). Crashed my version of the engine a couple of times in the process, not sure what the error was.

2/11 6 hours: worked on getting vr cave to work on my computer architecture. Running a hackintosh so somethings work better than others, specifically issues with my graphics card. Certain drivers were missing and it's hard to update.

2/13 2 hours Read literature on how vr is used in literature

2/14 4 hours: Worked on virtual reality cave and tried to get it running on my computer architecture, having issues currently where it crashes

2/16 4 hours reconfigured graphics card and learned how to program in c++ (did introduction)

2/20 3 hours continued learning c++ in order to learn how to fine tune projects and interact with other software. Also working on changing progress report.

2/21 4 hours read literature on how to convert 3d modeled world into a virtual reality space with interaction

2/22 4 hours played around with unreal engine trying to figure out how if I could play around and place various assets around the world including character figures and structures around the world.

2/26 2 hours Created video demo from the generated world without the mistakes and generated the course.

2/27 6 hours Added tutorial for first person shooter in Unreal Engine page (Some C++ knowledge is needed)

2/28 3 hours : Worked on editing the first person tutorial

3/2 3 hours: Began researching AR/VR in relation to education

3/4 [Wasn't able to do any work]

3/5 6 hours (reading) Checked out books from the library related to technology development and growth in school systems to research current and former trends of technology in schools.

3/5 5 hours Mined through school funding and library funding data

3/6 4 hours Began doing research of current state of VR and AR in educational spaces

3/8 4 hours determined goal for education/library project: Decentralized and personalized educational experiences.

3/12 6 hours Began drafting emails to be sent to school officials.

CLASS DATES FOR MILESTONES : Virtual/Augmented Reality in Education (Progress report -> Usually worked after class)

  • 3/15:4 hours: Draft emails and surveys for both high school students and teachers. Send out emails by Friday in-order to gather permission from the school districts. All surveys are going to include budgetary questions along with district requirement questions. These are trying to help answer whether vr/ar technologies are viable for a school environment in our current time period.

  • 3/20: 4 hours: Consolidate data and come up with a viable table of technology that would be effective in a class room. (Found some very cool technologies)

  • 3/22 5 hours: Continue the survey asking for more results. This time the survey should be directed towards children of a younger age. Also started working on AR application.

  • 4/3 3 hours: Create and distribute survey to libraries around the country asking similar things. Researched differences between ARCore, ARKit, and Vuforia

  • 4/5 2 hours: Research viable solutions already out in the market place and relate them to the data being collected.

  • 4/10 5 hours: Schedule phone calls/ conversations with the viable companies to learn what questions they are trying to answer for schools, teachers, and students.

MID-PROJECT POINT

  • 4/12 5 hours Interview teachers of multiple disciplines to determine their needs in relation to VR and AR (Wasn't able to interview). Continued working on ARCore project. Discovered that ARCore needed certain hardware and continued working with Vuforia to make a moving maze game.

  • 4/17 4 hours Interview Librarians to see if they're willing to take the technological leap forward. This will consist of creating interview questions along with researching current library paradigms and library issues that would be addressed. Added texturing to maze game and started new Vuforia project.

  • 4/19 8 hours Build a demo AR experience

  • 4/24 3 hours Create research poster with results (turned into personal research project)

  • 4/26 (2 hours)Finalize research poster results

READING PERIOD STARTS:

  • Create demo for demo day: 7 hours

  • Create poster for demo day: 3 hours

Progress Report

Course Deliverable: Data and comparison on how quickly and efficiently small full virtual reality experiences can be created. From planning to modeling to user interaction with various hardware. This development process will mostly be aimed at observing the virtual reality creation experience between the different tools available. By the end, the goal is to have implemented two demo hello worlds with two different software pathways noting the similarities and differences for each experience.

Activities: Beginning activities including determining which software to select based on project needs and expectations. After choosing the appropriate software I went through various introductory tutorials defining the software and its capabilities. Current activities include creating a small world using Unreal Engine 4. The world consists of a small cave and next steps will be to figure out how to get my small application up and running on steam VR and playable in the HTC-vive.

Relationship of Activity to Deliverable: The activities are aiding my in generating a full virtual reality experience with Unreal Engine 4 as quickly and efficiently as possible. The process is helping me take note of the learning curve along with the available resources.

Location: This will be located in the software development section of the paper detailing Unreal Engine's/Unity's viability in helping a new/mid experienced user generating virtual reality universes useful in entertainment and education.


Plan

15 February 2018

  • Deliverable

    • Tutorial on installing Unreal Engine 4

    • Tutorial on how to generate a bouncing ball using the Unreal physics engine

  • Activities

    • Create a bouncing ball in the virtual reality space in Unreal Engine

22 February 2018

  • Deliverable

    • Tutorial on how to integrate market place items into current projects and their impacts on project scope and viability.

  • Activities

    • Finalize generation of 3d virtual cave world. Along with determining hardware specs to allow for smooth running of software.

27 February 2018

Pending based on research on how to test virtual world (ask professor)

01 March 2018

Pending based on research on how to test virtual world

06 March 2018

Pending based on research on how to test virtual world

Deliverable Report:

My deliverables for this proposed project was to build an interactive virtual reality world as quickly as possible in Unreal Engine 4 and Steam VR. The location of this experience is in the VR software development guide detailing my experience learning the ins and outs of Unreal Engine so I could be able to describe it. (Will be published Wednesday)This includes the tutorials I followed along with the cheat sheets that I created or discovered to fully understand the shortcuts contained in Unreal Engine. The list of activities:

  • Hello world tutorial: This was to get me reused to the working environment of Unreal Engine 4 along with the work flow and standard procedure and best possible practices

    • 4 hours of time

    • Rating: 5

  • How to make a first person shooter tutorial: This was to get familiar with how characters were created and moved around in the world along with how to interact with them.

    • 3 hours of time

    • Rating: 4.5

  • How to make a moving character tutorial: I was learning how to modify characters and integrate them into the world

    • 2 hours

    • Rating: 4

  • Interacting with pre-made textures: Textures and objects needed to quickly and efficiently create a large world without much effort. Learned how to place and interact with the objects within the Unreal Engine world.

    • 4 hours

    • Rating: 3

Report

Deliverables:

  • Unreal Engine

    • Explored Unreal engine and created pages analyzing the software

  • Unity

    • Used Unity to make tutorials and then used it to make augmented reality tutorials

  • AFrame

    • Explored the capabilities of AFrame and discusses the accessibility

    • Created tutorial

  • ARCore

    • Tried to make ARCore tutorial for plane detection and hello world tutorial.

    • Created tutorial

  • Vuforia

    • Demo which built 3 demo models

    • Created portal presentation

    • Created tutorial on introducing Vuforia

  • Misc

    • Played around with different hardware configurations

    • Combined Unreal Engine and Steam (Was not able to put up a tutorial)

    • Discovered how to create and test AR applications with Android and ARCore

Time Spent on Course: 133 Hours