3/08/2017 Blog 5: Second project brainstorming and first iteration building

This week, we received help from David for an overhaul of the main concept of our project as well as some planning of what to do ahead and we proceeded to build our first iteration. First and foremost, David gave us his assistance on exploring ideas that would improve and enhance our base idea for our holographic map. For instance, we were able to cast aside the holographic projection of a 2D map as it would still remain two dimensional. We were also able to find a new way to illustrate our holographic map. In this new concept, we decided to use an existing map attached to a flat surface as our map. Instead of seeing the map itself as a hologram, we would use the holographic projector to project parts of the city as holograms. In other words, the holographic device would show skyscrapers as well as shorter buildings as it is moved around the map. A mobile device would be used to recognize the exact location where the holographic projector is and would generate the 3D models for the projector. As a result, this new idea forced us to adapt to these new changes. Despite the positive changes, we were quite uncertain of the way of how our new iteration should be done; we are still puzzelled with how we should associate the phone camera to the projection of 3D models. We did not lose time to act, however, for we set out to build and complete our first holographic projector before the end of this week. Though we did encounter some technical issues while building it, such as the miscalculation of the dimensions of the projector or the complications with the laser cutter, we were successful in both finishing and testing the holographic device. Next week, we plan to build an improved version of the projector and we hope we can test its reliability to project holograms. We would also like to make progress in the programming part