Devlog 7

These devlogs are mostly point form and basically reflect how I think about things. They document both what I learned and ideas that cross my mind. I make lists because my thoughts are usually in complete chaos, and organising them like that is a way to convince myself that it all makes sense.

Week 8: Devlog 7 (Mar 15, 2018)

Well, I have been perfecting the slides I was working on and this is much harder than I expected it to be. I have to fight my urge to add details and give more contextual analysis. In other words, I feel like I have to fight against my training as an historian. This makes me realise how our training as academics is detached from the real world. I kept hearing about how different it would be when in the work force, even if you ended up in a job closely related to your area of study. This is not to say that the entirety of the training is useless, but it feels disconnected. Now, this training feels well-suited if you end up becoming a professional academic. But, how actually becomes an professional academic out of all of those who pursue higher education? Not many.

I also went to take pictures of my triggers I’ll use for my augmented reality project. I quickly realised how weird some of the triggers I wanted to use could be. At what angle would people be when they tried to trigger a video or slide? How tall are they? Will their height affect how they point their cameras at the triggers? It tried to use fairly obvious ones, like text panels, and avoid using those at awkward places. I think that if AR projects are to become more widespread, they need to be imbedded in the production of exhibits. It’s not like it is impossible to make it work but treating them as an after thought makes it much harder.

The last issues that crossed my mind was language. The exhibit is both in French and English. It would be easy to make the AR exhibit bilingual if we only used text panels, but that would limit the number of triggers. Also, if the overlays where in both language, it would be too cluttered and hard to read, at least in my opinion. Ideally, there would need to be an option to chose which language the visitor wants. It would be easy enough to create two different auras on HP Reveal (god I hate the fact that it was bought by HP, and they changed the name to something so boring and corporate. puke), one in French and one in English. In that case, we could use the same triggers if they are images and use the text panels in the appropriate language. I think I’ll only do it in English for now, simply because of my time constraints, but if this project was to go forward, I would have to make it bilingual. I wonder what other issues I might encounter?