Research and Development in Digital Media

How can digital technology help people with Human relationships and interactions? (Daily Mail,2013) Every problem has a solution, if there isn't one it just means it hasn't been found yet! For this research and development class I wanted to focus on Human interaction and relationships between people. Specifically that of anxious ones. People can have difficulties with interacting with one and another due to many reasons. There people are generally, Anxious  Introverted Morbidly awkward have low self-esteem have a bad self image are bad at communication  have social anxiety disorder to name a few. For the research, I'll be focusing more on the above listed difficulties and try to learn and understand what,why and how this happens and try to solve/raise awareness about this widespread issue.

My previous research led me to finding a plugin that is used within Unity to create AR apps. The plugin responsible for this is Vuforia. Vuforia a software development kit for creating AR related apps for mobile devices. It's able to map certain points of an object that is identified as an unique pattern to assign an Augmented object to it. A popular example that uses the AR and rose it's popularity worldwide in a short period of time is PokemonGo.     (The Washington Post,2013)    What is AR? and what does it mean for us? (as explained by IDC) Augmented reality (AR) technology is here now, and companies of all shapes and sizes are utilizing it to change the way work gets done and to drive better outcomes for themselves and their clients. IDC believes that service-based organizations should be among the first to embrace this new technology or they could face near-term disruption of their business. Beyond the service elements within a wide range of ent...

To get hands on with unity I went on Youtube to understand how to create AR apps using unity. I found this tutorial on how to make an Augmented Reality App in just 6 mins!  He explains what are the requirements that are needed to create a functioning AR app and how to program it. The video was easy to understand and I recommend it to anyone who's like me getting their first hands on experience in AR and unity. The Youtube Channel that I visited was: MatthewHallberg. This tutorial led me to finding another software  plugin that is used to create AR called Vuforia which I will explain in my next post. References: 1)  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClm2DY6pj3ygKoKhEVr7KFw

Unity is a cross-platform game engine. It's used for creating not only games but also interactive projects, architectural projects, movies, VFX etc. Unity is quite user-friendly and it enabled me to use it to create an AR object that can be projected onto a physical marker and marker-less surface. There is a whole blog dedicated to what can be done using unity from their official website.  Without further hesitation I decided to get hands on with Unity follow some tutorials to achieve something similar to what I saw during my field trip. References: 1) https://www.mcvuk.com/.image/c_limit%2Ccs_srgb%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_768/MTUzMDY4NjM3MTYwODc1NjQw/unity-logo-simplejpg.webp 2) https://blogs.unity3d.com/?_ga=2.67406481.1406225317.1550132284-1633188824.1550132284 3) https://store.unity.com/

 As part of an educational field trip we were taken to the Art and Science Museum, Future World exhibit. The experience was very fascinating and "insta" worthy. What I've learnt from the exhibit is that, they used Xbox Kinect sensors and projection mapping to create interactive design elements. The exhibit almost entirely focused on using Kinect sensors and projection mapping for all of their displayed items. It's interesting to see how they achieved this using a simple user-friendly digital technology such as Kinect. It sparked some interest in me to try it out for myself in the future research.

O n the following weeks I will be posting, Updates Findings Research Material Case Studies Progress about software and technology that can potentially used in my final design project. I hope this blog brings out some interesting findings that I can use in my project.

Hello there, I am Hariharan Thennarasu.  A full-time student in Raffles Design Institute Singapore. On this blog page you will find my study and research on technologies and software used in the Multimedia Design field to create successful and futuristic design solutions.