The Jungle Book

Jungle book is one of the most loved and well-known books ever written for children. It is an interesting exercise to see how well we can augment the context of the book’s themes as an AR project. I believe this project does a fair job at achieving this goal and gave me some input on some things our project could have done better. I will go over what I liked in this project and my comments on what I might have done differently.

The ambient sound chosen as the background music for the projection plays only when the book is in view and is one of the better choices of background music I have come across. It is loud enough to be noticed while not being too jarring.

The scene is constructed well, with all models being in the right scale with respect to each other and the animals being partially under the trees with a few plants gives the idea of a forest without bringing too many models to crowd the book’s surface.

The lighting is done really well, I really liked the shimmery shadows of the trees on the animals and the ground.

The models chosen for the book are relevant to the themes of the book, though I might have added more wolves and made sher khan’s direction oppose the wolves to give an idea of the central conflict of the book. I also miss the inclusion of the protagonist Mowgli, but the given augmentation gets the job done.

 

The text, description and reviews are clearly readable. The choice of using a bigger font for all text works great. I also like the “tomato meter” as a rating system. The app requires the user to press and hold to read/watch the review, and plays the video review on hold. This is something I felt could have been approached differently as users might not want the video review to play when they are reading the text.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

The Harry Potter series was one of my favorite books to read growing up, but I remember being not interested in picking up the books for a long time earlier in my childhood because the books didn’t have any pictures in them. If I had known about the wonders in the world crafted by the author I might have been convinced to give the books a try earlier in my life. I was interested in how this project would tackle this problem. I have added my thoughts on the project below.

This is one of the projects that I have found that gets the theme of the story and it’s characters as models right. (I wonder though..Can we consider the werewolf as a spoiler?). I especially love the floating dementors and the flickering lamp-post. The knight bus is also a great inclusion. The quidditch pitch is also a major part of the book and I like that it was included, along with other major characters like Harry Potter, Sirius and Hagrid. I might have squeezed the knight bus into an unnatural shape (like in the book), to make it seem more interesting, but the project does a fine job.

I liked that the objects are placed around the book instead of on top of the book to accomodate for their size without crowding the view of the book. This might seem unintuitive when we view using our webcams, but when AR glasses are used, the field of view is much higher and this is how I believe the projections will work for scenes which need more area.

The ambient sound is the classic John WIlliams score. I can’t think of a better ambient background track for the book. Though, it could have been made to play only when viewing the book.

What I like the most about this project though is that the text , description and video reviews are very cleanly implemented. The language switch works as expected, and all the buttons work perfectly, without a miss for the most part. The reviews at the back use good contrast and lighting to make sure they are readable, and the view is switched between reading the reviews and watching the videos, which I liked.