CS428 Virtual and Augmented Reality

Week 4 Homework assignment due Friday 9/20 at 9pm Chicago time

One nice set of AR applications for smartphones has been those that let you point your phone up at a part of the sky (usually at night, but of course they work anytime) and have the app tell you what stars, planets, etc. are visible from where you are. If you want to know if that bright light on the horizon is a UFO or the planet Venus, then this might help. For this homework you should try out one of these apps - Pocket Universe is a nice one for ios, or Star Tracker or SkyView on Android. Knowing where you are on Earth and the orientation of your phone, its pretty easy to tell what celestial objects you are looking at since they don't move very fast. Take one screenshot when you are looking at the moon and another looking at Saturn. Please do not point your camera towards the sun while doing this - its bad for the camera's optics. As with the google Translate homework, add these two images to your homework page and then imagine a future where this app is built into typical AR glasses as a way to get more information about the world around you and quickly answer the question 'what is that?' In this case let's just focus on things in the Sky. Write about what other data sources might you want to integrate into an app like this? What different layers of information might you want to combine in this view.

Homework Files