Keith Lau

For this assignment, our group was tasked with thinking of a topic to do our project on. We decided on the theme of markets after a vote. I chose the recently closed MacPherson’s Fruit & Produce because of its decades long relationship it built with the residents in the South Seattle area for their welcoming environment, and excellent produce.

After deciding on a location, I began creating a mockup of the panels using photoshop. Some important elements that I wanted to use include:

• A picture of the store
• A photo gallery with some music
• A brief description of the location
• The store’s location on Google Maps
• Recent customer reviews

The photos were acquired from MacPherson’s social media pages, the description from various articles regarding its closure, and the reviews from Google Maps.

Next, I created all the individual panels using photoshop and exported them to EyeJack. Unfortunately, due to the 3MB limit on panel projects (3MBs in 2023, really?), I had to compromise on the quality of the photos, the size of the gif, and was forced to removed 2 other panels. I also had to shorten the length of the audio that I used for the gif, which was also unfortunate.

After the mockup was finished, I transferred everything over to EyeJack. I found the layout of the Panels page easy to use, and was able to quickly move every panel where I wanted to without issue.

While the location may be gone, its memory and its legacy will not be forgotten in the hearts of the thousands of customers that MacPherson’s has served in the decades that it’s been there.

Even though it’s nowhere near the true experience of purchasing a few bags of fresh produce there with the assurance of good quality products, the panels project featured can be shared to those who want to remember MacPherson’s, or for people to understand why the store was such as valuable location for local customers. Scan the code below to open the experience on your mobile device.

For this project, I chose to review the Niantic AR (AR+) feature in Pokémon Go, a popular location-based role-playing-game (RPG) available on all mobile platforms. (Link to article on Niantic’s website regarding the AR feature).

This feature is disabled by default, so Niantic AR (AR+) needs to be enabled by tapping on the pokéball icon on the center-bottom of the screen, then tapping the settings icon on the top right, tapping on the AR section of the settings menu, and enabling the feature from there (requires the game to restart).

After restarting the game, AR+ is ready to use. First, select a Pokémon of your choice from the inventory page and tap on the camera icon below the star button on the top-right corner of the screen.

After selecting a valid position, your Pokémon will appear on your screen on the area you tapped. You are able to interact with your Pokémon by either feeding it treats, petting it, taking pictures, and occasionally receiving gifts.

In my opinion, the UI for the feature is easy to figure out, but it some opinions I have on it include:

• The UI of the AR Camera and AR Capture is fine – the buttons are located on locations of the screen that are out of the way
• The buttons on the top could be slightly larger and have backgrounds like the ones on the bottom for increased visibility
• Camera button needs different colors

I would say that the AR camera feature is lackluster at the moment. Some issues I have for it regarding functionality include:

• The lighting for the surroundings not being applied to the Pokémon model, which makes it look out of place when taking photos.
• Not being able to resize, reposition, or pose Pokémon for photos.
• Having to re-place your Pokémon after moving too far from it.
• Placement scanning is overly restrictive – Pokémon can’t be placed on surfaces other than solid ground (i.e water, slopes, angular buildings, in mid-air, etc).

Overall, I think that the AR camera is rather niche and gimmicky, but a nice feature for occasionally taking pictures. The feature was only introduced around a year ago, and it’s experimental, so it’s understandable that it needs some major improvements. I’d like to believe that the feature has the potential to be the interactive experience that Pokémon players have been wanting for years if Niantic is willing to invest the time and resources to ensuring that AR integration is as useful and fun to use as the company hyped it up to be.

My immersive Augmented Reality Card experience involves a steam engine slowing chugging towards the viewer with some scenery on the side.

I wanted to see what I could do with the stock assets, so I searching around for something that I could work with, and found something that could be fun to animate.

This is a banner created in Photoshop. The only other asset that wasn’t included in Aero was a set of rails, and the sparkly gif, which I repurposed for banner decoration.

I considered using more of own 2D assets, but they looked out of place when framed next to Aero’s low-poly models. For instance:

I also wanted to use more models to pad out the landscape, but each one seemed to be several MBs in size, and plastering them throughout bloated the size of the file. This made it more tedious to re-download the file to my phone every time I wanted to view it, which is unfortunate because I wanted to create something more expansive.

Aero was easy to use once I got past the learning curve by following the provided tutorial and experimenting with the interactions on my own. I found it strange that the interactions aren’t alphabetically ordered, but that’s a nitpick that I got over once I remembered the positions of the ones I wanted.

Overall, I would say that Aero is a somewhat simple program for creating small AR projects, which it does well for what it is.

For this project, I used EyeJack, an application for desktop and mobile devices that allows you to create posters and view objects using augmented reality to create my own poster.

I came up with the idea by thinking about my interests, and how they could look in an AR environment. I chose to have a Pokémon appear on the screen, because the idea of it appearing on the screen and squawking at the viewer seemed like an appealing concept to try creating.

The animation was acquired from this link, which is an archive of animated Pokémon sprites and gifs that are available to export and use for personal projects (very convenient). Initially it was supposed to move across the image, but the animation played strangely in practice, so I opted to scrap it.

The only other issue I encountered was being unable to edit the sound in EyeJack itself, which leads to an unfortunate case of the squawking sound being spammed repeatedly. If I had known that beforehand, I would’ve adjusted the duration of the video to account for that.

Below is the poster created with EyeJack for the QR Code, and AR integration, as well as photoshop for the layouts. Follow the instructions on the bottom of the poster to get started.

Be warned, the sound is LOUD. and it rapidly replays because its only a few seconds long, so lower your device’s volume before scanning.