fredgibbs
commented
8 years ago @jacobwgreene: here are some comments (in order as I worked through the tutorial) from my ultimately unsuccessful attempt to complete the tutorial. It's really shaping up nicely, but I got stuck when trying to position the target and overlay sprites in the scene pane. Looking forward to any help you can provide. Also, have you solicited the reviewers you mentioned? Or should I find other people? Thanks!
I think we could use an early screenshot of what AR looks like (the current one is nice image, but hard to see exactly what’s going on unless you already know about it). The later BP image is good, but perhaps there is one that is more obviously relevant to historians that could be used? Perhaps the current image could be used alongside a zoomed in shot of the phone in that image?
It would be nice to provide a warning that this tutorial has a LOT of steps, many of which are simple connect the dots kinds of things. The AR stuff is actually a small fraction of most of the steps which are about setting up an environment generally. It’s also worth noting that most of the steps take longer to explain than to complete!
For this tutorial paragraph could use a simple definition of overlay.
Might be nice to have more info about Unity downloads. Not sure what version to get or if it matters. A note about download size and times would be helpful, just so readers know they can’t just sit down and do the tutorial without allowing time for getting set up.
A note about installing components would be helpful. I just went with the default settings.
The first screen shot of unity doesn’t match what i saw, which was a blank window. So I closed Unity and reopened it and it asks me to sign into my unity account, which means creating an account and verifying via email. this needs to be at least mentioned in the directions.
Can you define “Game Objects”?
“Try to locate the two game objects in your scene.” Not sure what I’m supposed to be doing here. If I’m supposed to notice that there is a camera and sun icon in the scene panel that correspond with the two objects on the hierarchy panel, I’d prefer that you just say that in the directions, since “Try to locate” sounds like a challenge, when it really isn’t.
When deleting the game objects, the “delete” button on a Mac doesn’t do anything; I had to right click and select delete.
In the choosing the image section, it would be helpful to have an overview of what’s going to happen: ie take a picture of an object that you will hold up to your computer’s camera. Therefore, it has to be something you can hold up easily and the photo has to be at an angle you can reproduce in front of the camera relatively easily. Flat, matte objects are better. Round and shiny objects will cause problems, right? We want to give the reader as few ways to go wrong as possible.
“sufficient” level of visual complexity needs to be explained. How am I to know what is sufficient? Perhaps better would be “significant visual complexity” (which is also vague but less relative). Are stark color contrasts something to look for?
It might be worth spelling out that the reader should take a picture with their phone and upload the photo to their computer. Surely people will end up doing that, but it’s nice for readers to know they are in fact doing what they are supposed to be doing.
You can also explain that the image should have as little marginal clutter as possible, since it will need to be removed; and possibly a good photo doesn’t need to be edited, true?
“unstable features” maybe should be “extraneous features not part of the target object”
On a Mac, image dimensions are found by right-click and “Get Info”.
My Dowload Dataset was labeled as Download Database. It might be nice to have a screenshot to show where to click.
It would be helpful early on in the Vuforia steps to explain WHY i need to upload this image (which presumably is to code it with tracking information), and that Vuforia does this and Unity does not.
When I upload my image, it is projected onto a 3D globe in the bottom of the inspector pane. Not sure if this matters, but I’d like to know!
“The scene view should now display your Image Target.” IT DOESN’T! So now what? Can you tell me the steps I must take to achieve this? Does it matter? After more random clicking of the red, yellow, and blue indicators and random clicking and dragging while holding keys down, I can get something closer to your screenshot, but it’s not exactly the same, and I don’t know what I’m looking for to see if I’m doing it right.
This part of the tutorial, while the individual steps are explained clearly, needs a higher-level explanation as to what’s going on, and how to remedy potential problems. There is really no explanation of what I’m trying to accomplish here, so now that the steps haven’t worked for me, I’m totally lost.
“The image target prefab will resize according the dimensions of your image, so you might need to manually adjust the size of the image target to ensure that it fits within the view of your AR camera. “ I have no idea what this means or what I’m looking for, especially since the one screenshot you have is significantly cropped, and doesn’t doesn’t look like mine anyway (apart from the different image, obviously). I can’t even begin to troubleshoot this because I don’t know how to express what’s wrong.
It’s fine to outsource the transform directions via the link, but I’m not sure what I’m looking to do with the transform. More screen shots would be super helpful. At a minimum, I need more explanation of what I’m trying to achieve.
When you said to “Try to locate the game objects” I started clicking and dragging on the scene pane. Did this SNAFU everything else?
Even after redoing all of the steps in a new project and not messing with the scene pane, I needed to zoom way out in the scene view to see my image loaded there, and the scene arrows do not match your screen shot. As is, the tutorial directions do not match what is happening for me, and I have no idea how to fix it. Clicking on the Game tab, I see only black. I don’t understand how I supposed to arrange the image and camera to wort together, or what that looks like in the Scene pane. Your screenshot doesn’t include the camera at all. The screenshot related to adding the overlay gives more visual clues, it seems the scale of my image is much different and I don’t know how to tell when I have the right size image.
I continued on anyway, and now I can see the overlay and the target image, but they are completely different sizes and in different planes (do they need to be the same size? is there any autoscaling?). I can transform them so they better overlap, but I’m just hacking at this and have no confidence that it’s going to work.
“Use the transform tools to position your image overlay.” Here again I don’t know what the correct position is relative to the target (or the camera), or how to tell if it’s correct.
I’ve tried resetting my images (as per the directions), but again they end up as WAY different sizes and on different planes. If I line them up by sight and transforms, is it really going to work?
Let’s delete the audio overlay and save for a more advanced tutorial (or put at the very end, since the mobile part is the real payoff here)
When I click play, my camera light turns on, but I don’t see anything but black.
I don’t see any point in continuing with the mobile section, since clearly I’ve gone off track. I’ll try to figure out what’s going on, but any clarification you can add to the tutorial would be very helpful. Perhaps the best approach is to assume someone (like me) has gotten their images out of sync (which may or may not have been my fault). How can you explain how to transform the images and position them with respect to each other and the camera in the scene pane?
I don’t think you need to add a lot necessarily, but a few descriptive sentences and maybe a screenshot or two would probably allow users to end up in a similar position to get back on track.
jacobwgreene
acrymble
jasoncrider
sugarloaf79
wcaleb
The Programming Historian has received the a new tutorial: Introduction to Mobile Augmented Reality Development in Unity by @jacobwgreene. This lesson is now under review and can be read at:
http://programminghistorian.github.io/ph-submissions/lessons/intro-to-ar-development
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