shawngraham / ar-archaeology Goto Github PK

A few notes from testing an activated template:

First, really cool! I already see a whole host of other applications for this beyond location-based storytelling, including university-wide tours with an AR application for visitors' phones (we saw several tours taking place on campus this afternoon).

The "$horticulture" point is in the middle of a fenced-off area where a construction company has set up a kind of on-site office. I'd suggest using 42.731973, -84.478518 instead. The "$benefactorsplaza" is in the middle of some bushes and, depending on the size of the buffer radius, people may have an issue finding it. I'd recommend moving it to 42.731785, -84.477802. I think the $natscience point would be fine, but I never was able to find it (see next comment).

The game itself is a little difficult to use when "calibrating the scanner" because it doesn't tell the user what lat, lon they're are currently at. The user has no way of knowing whether their 'calibration' worked for their location, or whether the location data isn't making it to the browser (which I discovered after 'resetting' the game and finding the start location was set to "0 and 0"). If it were me, I'd put "Currently you are at $Location.latitude and $Location.longitude" on every passage so the user can confirm that the browser is registering their movements. This seems like something that would help the template, rather than something each student might decide to do on their own.

Finally, the students might find using a tablet a bit easier for display of all of each passage's text, but the ones we have in LEADR probably won't work out in the plaza (they aren't on any cell service plans).

Other than these few things, this application really got me excited for its possibilities!

Under "Basic Twine Concepts," the "Twine" link is broken.

Movie: putting it in streaming assets doesn't seem to make it available as a texture; putting it in assets full stop (one level up) makes it available as a texture, but then seems to bork the build.

Change tracking image too; something seems up with that as well.

In "Passages for our POI," you describe, "Double click on your new passage, paste in the bumpf you put on your clipboard." You might also want to include, "delete the portion that points back to "[[my new passage]]" (which updates itself when you change the linked passage's title) from the copied new passage code."

The last paragraph of this section, which is about audio files, confuses me a little. When you say to put the audio files in the same folder, do you mean the same folder as the one that gets imported as the "Import from File" step?

Shawn, this all looks really cool -- and I am likely to refer my students to it the next time I have them do a 3D assignment. Two quick things I discovered from my own recent work with student 123DCatch projects:

1. If you're still running iOS 6 (as I am, sadly, because my phone doesn't have enough space for 7), 123DCatch won't work any more. It'll take the photos, but then it will hang on the upload. This is a known problem, and I assume has something to do with the SSL issues that iOS 6 ran into. You might want to let the workshop participants know that they'll need iOS 7.

2. Sketchfab has a rotation lock, so you can't rotate the images all the way around -- and it takes the rotation axis from the 123DCatch capture in a non-transparent way, so if you just go straight from 123DCatch to Sketchfab, you often end up with an object that's aligned sideways and won't rotate in the way you'd want it to (this happened a lot with my student projects: eg https://sketchfab.com/models/b037e1301c3248ca966d4d610442534e). You can fix this in Meshlab, but you have to realign the model within the rotation trackball. p3d.in doesn't have a rotation lock, so you can always get it to where you want it as a user (but then you can't have annotations).

I hope this is helpful! Good luck with the workshop. I'm going to try the VSFM tutorial and see how far I get...