The area of my artistic practice that I want to focus on improving this semester is creating a bridge between the physical and digital spaces. This involves working the skills needed to create an experience that utilizes AR and physical objects, similar to the AR cards that came with the 3DS. Below I have identified six areas to help me reach my goal.

• Improve 3D sculpting skills
  • I want to improve my skills enough to be able to complete 2 sculpts that are detailed but, have a unique silhouette (this is useful to help another area I want to work on). 

• Improve Maya skills 
  • Most of my work using Maya over the past couple of years has been on the programming side working on plugin development so I want to work on polishing up my Maya skills by creating models, properly unwrapping them, and baking UVs if needed.

• Learn 3D printing (The actual proper way to do it)
  • I want to learn how create objects properly to print something successfully. I have printed objects before but relied on the printer’s software to make corrects and deal with sizing issues for me.  

• Improve substance software skills 
  • The models need materials to fit in properly into an experience as not many people get excited about the default lambert material. So, I want to polish and improve my substance software skills by creating materials and use them in painting the models. I possibly want to try out using substance alchemist as I have never had a reason to use it before.

• Simple object detection 
  • I want to create an app that can detect simple objects by taking advantage of existing plugins that handle edge detection and recognition.

• AR application that works with the physical space
  • I want to improve my AR development skills by creating an experience that interacts with the space you are in and objects around. This would involve putting together the skills listed before and working with features built into ARcore such as plane detection.