DAT203 - A better gateway for Plymouth

To attract people into Plymouth, a gateway is needed, but to attract more requires a better gateway, because first impressions of the city is what makes people think about the city in general. To put this into context, whenever you're going into Plymouth by road or bus, you should be seeing something that will make you look forward to the city and its many attractions that form part of the city's heritage and cultural scene, as well as to make the whole experience more memorable.

At the moment, whenever you come in on the National Express or any other inter-city coach service to Plymouth, you would be faced with a façade of a city that has long been under decay by slow redevelopment, and its juxtaposition by the Drake Circus Shopping Centre and an underpass that gives the impression of danger and pessimism does not help with the first impressions, so the focus of my project is to improve the Bretonside Bus Station area. Initial ideas being mooted for the project is to provide an interactive and immersive experience for tourists, although at the same time, the façade needs to be improved to provide a vision of safety and a better experience for people coming into Plymouth.

DAT203 - Infrastructure

In every city, there is an infrastructure - London has one, Birmingham has one, Manchester has one, even our own Plymouth has one as well. However, the infrastructure of Plymouth isn't as well developed as other competing cities around the UK, in fact, pretty much every major city in developed Europe. In today's lecture, we was shown many examples of urban infrastructure, both in fiction and reality, of which we were then introduced to our assignment, a joint project with Plymouth City Council.

The reason for Plymouth's slow development dates back to after World War 2, when the city was bombed by the Nazi Luftwaffe. The city had more bombs dropped on it than Coventry, and as a result, most of the city had to be rebuilt from the ground up. in 1943, Sir Patrick Abercrombie drew up a plan for redeveloping the city, and was then enacted after World War 2, with 20,000 new houses built by the 1960s, and a new Civic high-rise completed during that same period. 

The city was designed with the automobile in mind, which has resulted in an American-influenced infrastructure and architecture, which was typical of many American cities at the time. In addition, it was also fitting for Plymouth, as it was a city that has historical links with the Plymouth in the United States, of which the Pilgrim Fathers discovered, but following a trend of pedestrianisation in the 1980s and the 1990s, the main roads going through the city centre's main shopping districts were paved over, and this has resulted in an important piece of infrastructure being severed or severely curtailed. 

In addition, the ills of the existing transport infrastructure were then felt in the 2000s and the 2010s as other comparable cities were then becoming fully developed, and with the recovery from the global financial crisis still underway, this has now come more important than ever, with the airport now closed and better railway links being needed to help boost growth in city commerce and to increase the speed of redevelopment.

DAT204: Application complete!

After 3 nights dedicating the whole weekend to the assignment, I have finally completed my semantic application. Since the proposal back in November, the project has come a long way, and with a design change occurring half-way, the result looks very promising, and does hold a lot of potential as to how this application can change the world.

The Introduction page is dominated with a profile picture and a brief introduction underneath it; the rest of the introduction is done in the Personal Profile. The content is marked up using XML in a polyglot environment (except for the addresses in the Contact page, where there is already a HTML5 semantic tag associated with it), and the content have CSS3 background transition effects to provide emphasis, which helps employers to easily read the content, especially in environments where processing of applications in a swift and timely fashion are required. The content box is styled natively using CSS3, as is the text in the AJAX tabs, and in terms of AJAX, it is used (with JQuery magic) to display the content in the same page from separate HTML files without having to go to another page.

Adding to the easy-to-use nature of the application, the content pages are formatted in a way that even the less-experienced users can easily populate the pages, provided that they have at least a plain-text editor and some knowledge of HTML (the custom XML tags are already provided for the user), because the main CSS file already provides the styling for the content, so whenever it appears unformatted in a WYSIWYG editor, the content becomes styled once it is loaded up in the application.

Overall, I've managed to produce an application that has a lot of potential, and even though I've already seen many examples of online portfolio websites, this semantic application has a lot of potential to impress employers in the professional world...

To view the application, click here: http://www.elnormo91.co.uk/semanticapp/semanticapp.html

DAT204: Evolution of the design

After trying to make the website work with the originally-proposed design, I've then decided to take a different approach. Whilst trying to implement as many CSS3 features as possible, I've then discovered something that can make the website very lightweight yet powerful; in addition to the existing polyglot markup approach, I've also discovered the wonders of JQuery and AJAX.

The JQuery will be used to make the Edit dialogue hidden until the user clicks on it, and the AJAX will be used to paste the content from separate HTML documents making up the pages into the same website, via the use of tabs, without having to go to a separate page, replacing the need to press backwards whenever the user wants to go back to the previous page.

In terms of interface, I've decided to change it to one that can relate to businesses very well, with the content of the eCV centralised, so then more emphasis can be placed on the content, and with the tabs linking to the different sections coloured in a rainbow-style scheme, in a similar fashion to how Filofaxes are sectioned by colour code, or how some documents are bookmarked, to make the sections easier to remember. The goal that was envisioned in my specifications was to create something similar to Zerply, with a more business-oriented interface and a standardised layout.

DAT204: Laying down the foundations and tightening up the ratchet...

So far, the foundations of the semantic application has been laid, and what was originally the empty shell of an app that has yet to see the light of the day has now started to progress. In terms of the app, I have chosen to include XML in harmony with HTML5. Despite it sounding like a rather uncanny marriage, the ability of using custom tags in HTML5 is still there, and even though XHTML was going to be the future, the clear direction was that HTML5 eventually emerged to become the winner.

However, the idea of 'XHTML5' still hasn't been put to the metaphorical bed yet, and as this application shows, the idea of XML semantics with the many features of the HTML5 platform can still be a good one.

As the Christmas holidays are starting to just come around the corner, the work still doesn't stop; the next part is to get the graphics sorted out and figure out a way of getting the content in whilst adding in the wonderful HTML5 features.

DAT203: Augmented Reality: more about it

Although it has been said that the Wizard of Oz can be considered to be the very first example of augmented reality (or a model of which a typical AR setup is based upon), the first documented example of a form of augmented reality dates back to the 1950s, with the advent of Sensorama, which was a machine that produced visuals, sound, movement, and even smell. However, it was not considered a success, as there was no financial backing to support the project and to apply patents to it.

In 1966, the first form of visual augmented reality, the head-mounted display (HMD) was invented by Ivan Sutherland, which provided the user with a view of a virtual world, which applied the principles of the Wizard of Oz model. Whilst the phrase 'augmented reality' was coined in 1992, the first, modern functioning form of augmented reality was created in 1992 by the US Air Force Research Laboratory, known as Virtual Fixtures, and in 1999, a standard platform of augmented reality, ARToolKit, was created by Hirokazu Kato of the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, and has since been ported to many platforms, including mobile devices, of which their potential was not realised until the boom of smartphones in the late 2000s.

A more recent implementation of augmented reality was created in 2008 as Wikitude, a travel guide that utilises the smartphone's built-in camera to overlay information onto the screen, and then provides the user with information about places to visit, shops, restaurants etc.

DAT203: Augmented Reality: Is the Wizard of Oz considered to be the first example of AR?

Today, we've been taught more about Augmented Reality and the Wizard of Oz, but why the Wizard of Oz? Is it because, because, because of the wonderful things he does, or is it because it hints about the earliest possible example to date? Surprisingly, the Wizard of Oz is used as a model for Augmented Reality, because it is based on the idea of seeing the world from a different perspective via a wearable medium, which in most cases like the Emerald City, would be through special glasses.