January 28 2011

Here are the things we should start familiarizing ourselves with:

  1. AR Toolkit - this is a library of open-source Augmented Reality (AR) code. Google AR Toolkit.
  2. AR Toolworks - this is a for-profit spinoff of AR Toolkit; they have open-source stuff as well; they may be more active in keeping things current.
  3. Glyphs - an optical sensor (webcam, camera phone, etc.) recognizes these. Cusack showed me an example of one; it was just a square with a thick black border and a word inside of it. A camera sees this and recognizes it as a marker, kind of like the motion dots that Alex was describing. Look up “AR Glyphs” on YouTube; there are a few cool videos that Cusack showed me.
  4. OpenGL - stands for “Open Source Graphics Library.” These are pre-written programs and functions that we'll be able to call to produce the graphics we want. It works with a variety of languages; Cusack suggests C.
  5. We need to decide what platform we're going to design this for. I know we're all thinking iPhone; that works for me but Cusack will want to discuss that with us.

February 2 2011

Questions we need to answer:
  1. Are we going to be able to use XCode to program for an iPhone? If so, we need to learn to use Xcode.
  2. Do we have to use Objective C to program for an iPhone? »Yes. Yes, we do.
  3. Should we start developing a program for something like a laptop webcam in order to test functionality, or would that be too different from the architecture of an iPhone program?
  4. Where do we get open source code for AR Toolkit and OpenGL?

February 8 2011

  1. OpenGL tutorials available at nehe.gamedev.net (see “Links”).
  2. Apple's iOS SDK, XCode, will be necessary to build for the iPhone.
  3. Coding will be in Objective-C.
  4. Immediate goal is to get comfortable in the XCode IDE and learn some Objective-C.

February 22 2011

Meeting with Professor Brian Cusack Lesson 1 on C and Computer Architecture

cusacklecture2-22-11.doc

February 23 2011

Lesson 2 on C

cusacklecture2-23-11.doc

February 26 2011

Sharang and Shivam work in Mac Lab, HELLO WORLD works… kind of… (in xcode) Notes:

xcodenotes.doc

March 01 2011

Lesson 3 from Professor Cusack on Web Design and Web Servers

cusacklecture3-01-11.doc

March 01 2011

Lesson 4 from Professor Cusack on C

cusacklecture3-02-11_c_.doc

Current Goals

March 04 & 05 2011

Team meeting to work on Xcode in the Mac Lab. We got Xcode running on the Macs in 806 - we require an administrator password in order to compile. Glyph recognition and basic functionality is built in to the example program downloaded from ARToolkit's website. Shivam and Sharang met on Saturday to read through the tutorials of what “simpletest.c”, the example program, does step by step. We will probably only need to change a couple of lines of code in the draw() loop that define what image is drawn and where.

March 14 2011

Thus far we have run into numerous roadblocks figuring out XCode, as it is an IDE that does a lot behind the scenes. It took us a few days to figure out what file we were actually altering by playing around with the OpenGL code within the executable files.

Now that we've figured that out, we're working on expanding the OpenGL functionality of the base program downloaded from ARToolkit. We've managed to draw our own polygons, resize them, move them around on the screen, make them spin about an axis, and color them. We are currently stuck on texture mapping, which is to be the principal OpenGL operation in our final program. Texture mapping “paints” a bitmap image onto a 2-D plane or 3-D object in space. We've succeeded in creating the objects but not texture mapping onto them as of today.

March 15, 2011

Updates from individual work over spring break: Sharang integrated the keyboard with the draw loop - we can move and reshape polygons while the draw() loop is running using keys as defined on: http://haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/preferences/keymap.html

March 29, 2011

Meeting with Professor Cusack Sharang and Shivam working on getting cURL into Xcode, we finally realize that Xcode has default curl/curl.h Matt is working on building an interface using OpenGL Alex is experimenting with php to be able to access an sql lite database of the images and artist bio

April 4, 2011

Shivam and Sharang working on libcurl for ever and ever… I think the way to add libraries to link is to highlight the app (under targets in the tree), right-click, and add 'existing frameworks' (since libcurl is built into xcode). However, a new error is occurring: “no active executable detected at path”. This may be solved with another copy of the ARTookit folder that we have been using as our base source code. I may have screwed mine up. Documentation is quite poor, and we dont know what we are looking for, nor is there someone familiar with xcode to help. Hopefully libcurl will cooperate soon.

April 8, 2011

Shivam and Sharang continued working on libcurl for several hours… We finally got it to work with Professor Cusack's help. Xcode still has some glitches but we are able to compile the code and run the .app file separately. With this, we can download images from the internet and use them as images the program displays as the paintings. Its still a little buggy, but we are optimistic.

April 19, 2011

Meeting with Professor Cusack to discuss the final stages of the project. Status Update: 1. libcurl is functional and can download multiple images from OUR server [the getimage() function] 2. Secure Login feature is functional with a confirmation email and subsequent login code 3. Problems with interface builder and OpenGL commands have limited development of the interface 4. Theoretical server name will be vmedia.cooper.edu, and may be used for all types of media as a general online gallery even if the app doesnt download all the media on the server. Work in Progress: 1. Upload feature for the web server 2. another libcurl function, gettxt() will download a text file containing a list of artists and the titles of their art, which will feed the getimage() libcurl function the paths to the images of each artist. this will be the first thing the app does. 3. The server will have to re-write or replace this txt file each time an artist uploads a new image 4. Interface development is still in progress

April 20, 2011

Shivam and Sharang did research on the parsing functionality that the gettxt() function will have to have to sort the txt file for the artists and their artwork. We plan to divide the txt file by semicolons, an example was posted at: http://students.cooper.edu/phadke/testlist.txt

April 29, 2011

Sharang and Matt work on combining the interfacing code with the libcurl functionality. Now the program has a basic user interface and is able to download an image from the internet. We restructured the multiple image capability so it isnt computer specific ( concatenating the strings of the location of the image), but we are having a lot of problems with the syntax of xcode.

April 30, 2011

Sharang and Shivam worked significantly on the concatenating of the strings and now the code has a basic interface, downloads images from our web server, and saves and loads those images in an intelligent way.