Day 3: ... and Walter

Andy

Andrew Wise is the original creator of the Augmented Reality demo, and I'll be meeting with him on Friday so he can show me the ropes and explain how to go about adding new models to the current system (which needs to be done in time for Animation 13 in early July!).

We know Andy documented some of the AR work (which would be very useful to see!) but so far we haven't been able to find it on the machines that currently have the AR Demo installed. The search continues.

Toby provided a copy of Andy's research paper (describing the AR project no less), as well as a guide to XNA (software package used by the AR demo), so I will have some interesting background reading to do tonight!

Donald and Walter

Specced up a new motherboard, CPU and RAM for Donald, then had a quick look at Walter to see if it would take the same upgrades - was subsequently surprised by the decent hardware hidden in there! Where Donald was kitted with an nforce 650 motherboard, slower 800MHz RAM, a simple Thermaltake cooler and an OCZ Stealth Extreme PSU (mid range parts in all); Walter sported a full-on Core 2 Quad Q9400, 4GB of Dominator 1066MHz RAM, a Corsair HX620 modular PSU (!), a superfancy Zalman Cooler (see pic below), all bolted onto a Biostar TPower I45! Legendary overclocking capability and pretty strong performance even today.

Walter had one of these devices keeping a Q9400 at 24 degrees C idle!

So Walter won't be getting the upgrade treatment (need to get your money's worth for them there components).

There were also some suspicions about Donald's GPU being the problem (Donald and Walter had been upgraded with identical cutting edge Asus GTX560 Ti DirectCU II cards somewhat recently). I swapped the cards around but both worked perfectly fine in Walter, even under intense load for extended periods of time (Unigine Heaven benchmark) where they performed as expected and temps topped out at a cool 60 degrees. Of course, neither card worked in Donald.

While I was there with a screwdriver to hand I also took out all of the PCI devices, USB devices, USB firewire and audio plugs from the mobo, all drives, everything except the essentials (CPU, one stick of ram in slot 1, the GPU, the PSU) and tried starting Donald after resetting the CMOS. No luck though, Donald was as obnoxious as usual - fans spinning, lights on, nothing else happens.

Windows laptop that can run the Augmented Reality Demo

I set about investigating an old Acer laptop that was crashing whenever we attempted to run the AR demo, in order to determine the problem and possibly spec a new suitable Windows laptop that can actually run the demo. There's one major rule: said laptop needs to be cost-effective!

The acer has a core 2 duo 2GHz processor (adequate) and Intel GMA 4500MHD integrated graphics (terrible), and is running Windows 7.

Symptoms: When AR software is executed, nothing happens.
If no webcam is attached to the laptop, it crashes with a "forced to close" error message. If webcam and external TV are correctly attached and set up as required, nothing happens when the AR demo is run. A look inside task manager shows the process starts up, uses the CPU a bit, then terminates itself silently.

As of now it is not clear why the software isn't running. There are a few possibilities:

1. The integrated graphics are unsuitable
2. The software wasn't installed properly
3. Some other error

The reasoning for 1 as far as I know is the fact that every other computer that has run the AR demo has had an Nvidia graphics card installed in it (Walter has a GTX560 and the AIG lab win XP PC has an 8800GTX), so that may be a factor. In that case the new laptop will need some form of Nvidia dedicated graphics. Unfortunately this may inflate the price as cheap entry level notebooks tend to have integrated graphics as a rule (which, put simply, is why they are cheap). I am not definite the graphics is actually the issue (as the laptop runs many other XNA demo applications just fine, only not the Augmented Reality one), perhaps Toby and Andy can advise on this.

There is always the possibility that the problem is number 2, but that can be ruled out by simply reinstalling the AR demo, and the component software (XNA etc) on the Acer laptop. I don't know how to do that as of yet (I need to ask Toby/Andy).

If the problem is not related to the specs of the Acer laptop or the software installation, then we may be wasting our time with a new laptop, so it will be essential to determine this before hand.

Testing cutting edge AR software on a Macbook Pro

I also began installing some of the AR toolkits and software components from the AR survey (that is still underway here), just to have a play with them on the Macbook graciously provided for my use by Toby. Installed Qualcomm Vuforia so far (one of the most popular SDKs for Augmented Reality, works with Android, iOS and Unity dev tools). Eclipse, the Android SDK, the Android developer toolkit (which are requirements for Android-Vuforia development) and the Vuforia SDK itself have all been installed on the Mac, but I have yet to actually try out a test app. This should be an interesting foray into mobile Augmented Reality (another of the tasks set out for this summer project).

Cheaper robust marker cards

During my survey of the cutting edge AR systems, I came across a website selling marker cards from Japan: http://nyatla.jp/nyartoolkit/wp/

The price is (I think) 620JPY a card, and apparently they have been tested for durability against water and dirt (but seemingly not against schoolkids), although with the entire website in Japanese it is somewhat difficult to extract information via Google Translate.

It looks like there are some packs available: 980 Yen (inc postage and tax) for 5 sets of 10 piece marker cards, apparently designed for teaching in a classroom environment.

The translation continues!