Augmented Reality Golf (C++)
Winter 2010 | Independent Study
Augmented Reality Golf is a cross-disciplinary independent study project with over 30 students involved. Using an actual ball and club, players get the same feeling as playing a real game of golf; however, everything takes place on a virtual fairway!
The project team is a fantastic, and the game has been progressing amazingly; however, on a personal level, this is not one of my great successes. I struggled quite a lot with the project; however, I’ve learned a lot about working on a large team and going into an already started project.
I list this project not for my technical achievements, but for just how much I learned from it. Some of it was learning from success, and a lot of it was learning from my mistakes.
- Responsibilities: Augmented Reality programming (utilizing ARToolkit and Vuzix’s AR SDK), sound research
- Libraries used: Ogre3D, Boost
Lessons Learned
- Working on a large team is a very different experience from a small group. The AR Golf project was my first experience with something of this scope.
- Ask for help! In my smaller in-class assignments, I typically was one of the better programmers in the group and we’d always start from scratch. On this project, I was the newbie walking into a pre-established group, code base, etc. Others had worked on this project for months, some over a year. I naively tried a “just keep at it, and hope Google helps when you get stuck” approach. I don’t recommend that strategy
- In a large project, you often have the burden of figuring out how to go about challenges you’ve never seen or even thought of before. I’d never worked with Augmented Reality before, and there is not a lot of documentation out there about how to work with it. Regardless, I still had a duty to figure it out and get it working.
- Working with others’ code is quite different from working with your own. I walked into the project with a big chunk of the engine already written by others. Adjusting to this was harder than I had expected.
- Don’t bite off more than you can chew! Be sure you can follow through on your commitment to a project. I was not able to devote as much time as I thought I could to this project, and I missed deadlines. I have since learned not to over-commit myself.
