SCARLET+ ‘Coding for the terrified’ or how I learned to stop worrying and love php.

One of the greatest worries I had when taking on my role as the project co-ordinator for University of Sussex’s augmented reality (AR) project was the actual building of it. The AR applications I first looked at had such an impressive wow factor that I wondered how I was ever going to learn to construct something that looked to be so complicated and techy. I had experimented with a range of different programmes designed to create your own AR application and had found them either very simple to use but extremely limited in their capabilities, or wonderfully flexible but containing a technological brick wall against which it felt like I was beating my head with very little result.

On Monday 1st October I took a trip up to Manchester along with Marie-Therese Gramstadt from the University for the Creative Arts, for a technical workshop with Matt Ramirez from Mimas, as mentioned in  Matt’s post, below.

What a difference a day makes!

The importance of face-to-face contact for anyone venturing for the first time into the world of code, and webspace, and php files cannot be overstated. Having a real person, an expert with practical experience, to ask questions of is a powerful learning tool. This is particularly true of such new technology, where how-to guides and the like are few and far between.

 

By providing us with carefully explained lines of code to and showing us what happens when different sections are changed, Matt has given me the framework and confidence to create my own AR applications. My understanding of the way AR works has increased exponentially and I now feel far more able not only to build the application but also to explain to others how it works and show them how to create their own; embedding the skills into our department as we have wanted to from the beginning.

One thought on “SCARLET+ ‘Coding for the terrified’ or how I learned to stop worrying and love php.

  1. Pingback: Portal to another world | SCARLET (Special Collections using Augmented Reality to Enhance Learning and Teaching)

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