Thinking Outside the Box

You may have noticed that I dropped off the blogging world for precisely 3 weeks. I didn't plan that - technically speaking I've never taken that long of a break unless it was for university exams - it happened because I kind of felt lost. From my latest post Your Skills, I mentioned that I felt sort of lost in terms of finding a job in my field, and that kind of spread into every aspect of my life - blogging, crocheting, being active on Instagram & Twitter and Youtube kind of got chucked to the back seat as I began a new course to learn a new coding language.

As I was doing this course, I also felt I didn't want to lose myself in this course and tunnel into it as if I were a seeker playing Quidditch and the course was the golden snitch. I attended a tech meet up on Web Based Augmented Reality. The ~assignment~ was to create a snowman that would then appear on a holiday card when a person hovered their phone over a specific QR code.

The night ended and we were supposed to have a snowman to present. This was only the second time I've worked with Augmented Reality coding-wise so I wouldn't say I was struggling to get everything I wanted to look nice, but yep that's pretty much what happened. When I left, my snowman wouldn't appear on my QR code, mind you it was nowhere near how I wanted it to look like, so the organizer told me to email him and we can figure out what was wrong the next day.

When I went home, I began thinking of what I wanted this snowman to look like (when I left it just looked like a tragic snowman). At the moment I'm reading the Harry Potter Series - currently on Order of the Phoenix! - and what I was attempting to do was make Harry Potter in snowman form.  

After 4 days straight of staring at my Snowy Harry Potter, wondering if it'd look the way I wanted it to look, I managed to get the hang of how Augmented Reality shapes work, learned how to make animation for some ~magic~ coming out of the wand, and learned how to get said snowman on a QR code when a person hovers over it.

SNOWY POTTER LIVES:

the lil red bit moves up and down!!
want to hear the music in the background?
GO HERE TO SEE IT LIVE

(heads up - if you're on mobile put your volume up & flick the side volume thing up too to hear the music in the background!)

At one point I'm pretty sure I started dreaming about this snowman - from listening to the soundtrack, to reading Order of the Phoenix as a ~break~ from coding Snowy Harry Potter, I basically lived and breathed Harry Potter for 4 straight days. 

I have a couple of friends that love Harry Potter so - at the start of this web-based augmented reality snowman project, when I was given the assignment from the tech event, I already knew I wanted to gift it to them via sending them the QR code on a card to see Snowy Potter for themselves.

And then I started staring at an empty Amazon Box in my house.

LIGHT BULB MOMENT:  Why don't I create a literal wizarding world and place the Snowy Potter QR code in the center so that way when he appears, he's where he's supposed to be?

I searched for a ~dark forests~ first and found one that was perfect! It looked just as the scene when Professor Lupin transformed into a werewolf. After thinking for a little bit, I decided to look for regular forests rather than dark ones- dark photos wouldn't have come out the same on the screen when printed.

Back to the box now - how do I make this box a Virtual Wizarding World that will be portable and easy to send in the mail?

LEGOS!

Each forest panel has a lego part attached to them at the bottom of the panel and all the person would have to do is find its identical lego on the ~ground panel~ to attach it to!

Here is the Wizarding World with lil Snowy Potter!

When I was younger I remember playing with boxes using my imagination to create different worlds- and now, here I am, creating a wizarding world by using a box for everyone to be able to see. The thing that I've mainly been thinking about is how we expect things to happen linearly - i.e. school, then university and then working in the real world. Life kind of doesn't work out that way and I'm learning to be okay with that. As I mentioned in my last post, it's been a bit of a struggle finding something in my field for work (I majored in Computer Science) but it does help to remind myself that what is for me will not pass me. It's really easy to think that every door is closing, but there is one/several doors open; we may be taking one too many detours but we'll get there soon.

Now here's the fun part!

to see live go here!

So at the moment I have Snowy Potter & Snowy Ron (Hermione is currently being made!) and I thought it'd be fun to add some more snowmen inside. 

This is where you guys come in!

Do you have a fictional character / person from a movie you'd like to see in web-based augmented reality snowman form? LET ME KNOW IN THE COMMENTS BELOW! I will be making a thread on Twitter, mentioning when each of the snowmen are done - c'mon you're bound to have ONE fictional character you'd love to see in snowman form!!

Anyone from the Harry Potter series you want to see made?

LET ME KNOW!

If you want to see all snowmen created from the meetup you can go HERE!

ps. and yes this is actually my new bookmark as you can see in the first photo haha! It's just a piece of paper with the QR code! Want to twin with bookmarks? HERE you go - print out he QR code below and paste it on something and vwalla a web-based augmented reality bookmark with the soundtrack in the background too!

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