Hello and Welcome

Hello and welcome to my blog for my final year major project, I am Phillip Shakesby and I am about to enter my final year of an Interactive Multimedia Design degree at Hull School of Art and Design.
During my final year I have to produce a major project with a clear vision of function and purpose, relative to my own individual specialism and career direction.

I will have to demonstrate high levels of professional awareness and sensibility and I will have to show creativity, innovation and technical ability relevant to the professional orientation, which in my case is Interactive Multimedia.

The brief for this project will be placed here as soon as it is available.

I propose to create a local heritage augmented reality mobile phone application that will run on the android mobile phone service as a flash application.

My application will guide users to specific places where they can view 3D representations of buildings that have been lost to time, specifically building destroyed during World War II.

The 3D representations will display when a user stands in a specific location and faces a specific direction. Historical information about the buildings or places featured within the application will also be available for the user to compliment the visual representation.

My decision to develop this project came from a desire to produce a piece that can provide local historical knowledge to users of all ages in a new innovative medium.

My last surviving grandparent past away in 2009 and I realised that some of the stories and knowledge my grandparents had passed down to me would not be available to younger people via a firsthand source.

I feel it is important to know a bit about who you are and where you come from and this application should be able to provide an important view of the past in a modern way.

The platform in which I am going to create this application has only just started to provide full support to applications of this type in this particular format, so my application will be at the cutting edge of development.

It is slightly ironic that I am choosing to use new technology to display a view of the past but I believe this application could provide a useful service for those interested in local heritage.

This project will challenge me in many ways as I have never developed a fully working mobile phone application. Last year I did attempt the creation of a mobile application on a different platform and I was unable to get the project to a fully working state within the timescale of the project. Even though I did not manage to complete my previous application I did undertake a mobile application development training course on Lynda.com and I conducted a large amount of research into mobile applications including best practices, I will review this research and I feel it will help with this project. The experience of working on that project will also help me, not only the parts of the project and processes that I attempted with success but the unsuccessful processes and elements of the project will also be of great use as they show me what not to do, so I can be more efficient with my project by using the benefits of my experience.

I am also setting myself a great challenge as I have no experience whatsoever of designing in 3D, I intend to complete a 3DS Max design course on Lynda.com in order to gain an understanding of the software interface and principles of 3D design.

I will complete thorough research in all areas of this project as I intend to give myself the best possible chance of not only completing this project but delivering a successful, innovative, desirable application that displays my working skills and ethics to the best of my abilities.

In all I know this project will be challenging and at times I will struggle and wonder why I made certain choices but at the moment I am excited and ready to begin, please feel free to follow me on this journey.