When we started this project, I had a lot of ideas about what I would do. I wanted to use my apartment as the location since I do most of my work from there. I either wanted to place AR furniture around my apartment to see if it would look realistic enough to use as a decoration app (to see how the space would look if that furniture occupied that space), or show objects around my apartment that would need to be interacted with in order to solve a murder mystery. In the end, I chose the murder mystery theme.

To test Aero, I tried placing some objects, but was running into problems. I was able to place 2D images into my space very easily though.

Although I did not get much done in terms of a final product, I am proud of my work. I have learned a lot about 3D low-poly and high-poly modeling, texturing, editing, and showing objects in virtual space using AR technologies. Some of the work I have done over the past several weeks is not able to be put into AR space because it was done using free software that does not allow for the correct exporting file types. I was however able to get a model that I made in Blender to be put into AR space using Adobe Aero. It was a wrench model that I had made with the intention of it being the “murder weapon” for the murder mystery game!

I can’t believe I got it working! This was very exciting for me because not only were the steps along the way difficult for me, but I did not think I would be able to actually put anything I had made into AR. The wrench is small and simple and ended up looking weird when in AR (probably a lighting issue), but for me it was a triumph that I got it to show up there!

Aero was weird and would not let me use the wrench for the longest time, but after some research, I was able to figure it out. The issue seemed to be that I was not exporting it as the correct file type. In any case, now that I know how to do this from start to finish, I plan on practicing this whole process more and more until I get good at it and can make the full murder master game I was planning on making! With the time constraints and our next project starting on Monday, this AR project will probably be pushed back until after the semester ends and be just for fun and practice.

The biggest complaint I have about this project is that I ran into issues at every step of the way because I can’t afford the software that we used in class. The easy fix was for me to try to do my work on some school computers, but this proved more difficult to do than I was hoping since I am almost NEVER on campus except for while I am in class. What I had to do was find free versions of the software or different versions that I could afford to get this project done. In the end, it worked out, but I feel that it slowed me down considerably because of looking for software, downloading it, learning it, and because the free software alternatives almost always were less functional than the paid mainstream ones we were using in class.

I can’t wait to keep playing around with this AR stuff in the future!