I am taking CS 491 - Virtual and Augmented Reality class taught by Professor Andrew Johnson.
This page maintains a log of all the assignments and projects done as part of this course.
03 Dec 2018
The Array of Things is a collaborative effort among leading scientists, universities, local government, and communities to collect real-time data on urban environment, infrastructure, and activity for research and public use. Our project attempts to visualize some of this data in Augmented Reality.
23 Nov 2018
This week we concluded with the presentations for student’s choice topics in our CS 491 class. Each student had put in a lot of effort in creating their presentations. In this post, I will be reviewing two technologies – Vuzix Blade, presented by Ryan Nishimoto, and Holosuit by Latika Bhurani.
09 Nov 2018
Ever since the unveiling of its HoloLens project, Microsoft has come up with a variety of demonstrations of how this portable, augmented reality headset may be useful for businesses as well as consumers. Microsoft Research’s Interactive 3D Technologies group is working on real-time 3D hologram projection of people with the help of HoloLens.
05 Nov 2018
The Teslasuit is a full-body VR haptic suit. It is “the world’s first fully integrated smart clothing apparel with Haptic Feedback, Motion Capture, Climate Control and Biometric Feedback systems.”
29 Oct 2018
ARray of Things is our proposal for the third project, for our Virtual and Augmented Reality class at UIC.
22 Oct 2018
Every Day is Halloween is a Virtual Reality Funhouse App made using Unity and VRTK
19 Oct 2018
While we work on finishing our second project for the Virtual and Augmented Reality course, which is about making a halloween-themed VR funhouse, we were tasked with exploring how a scaled up world will look like. Till now, people have just imagined how it will feel like if we suddenly shrank down in size – much like how Ant-man does – but now, with the help of VR, we can make it real and experience...
12 Oct 2018
Augmented Reality is gaining a lot of traction lately, as more and more smartphone shopping apps are starting to allow their users to preview items in their surroundings, before purchasing them.
05 Oct 2018
This week we concluded with the presentations for Project 1 in our CS 491 class. Each group had put in a lot of effort in creating their projects, and had come up with many creative themes around how breakfast may look like in the future, where everyone is wearing Augmented Reality gear all the time. In this post, I will be reviewing the works of two groups in particular – Group 5 (Vannia Samy) and...
24 Sep 2018
Eat It is an Augmented Reality app, developed using Vuforia and Unity.
21 Sep 2018
“It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s Superman!” Well, probably not, but if you have ever wondered looking at the sky – “What is that?” – there are many Augmented Reality apps out there that can answer that question for you. All you have to do is open one of these apps and point your smartphone camera towards the object you are curious about. The app will show you exactly which star, constellation, or planet, are you...
14 Sep 2018
Google Translate has been around for quite some time now. Today we are going to discuss about one of its features – the Instant camera.
07 Sep 2018

Screenshot of an AR astronaut rendered on top of its image target using Vuforia and Unity
This week we looked at how to use Unity and Vuforia to render any virtual object in an augmented reality scene. Vuforia makes it very easy to have a simple AR scene ready in a few clicks!...
31 Aug 2018
What is meant by Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality?
Virtual Reality (VR)
Virtual Reality replaces a person's field of view completely by a virtual world. The perception of a virtual world may be further reinforced by using stereoscopic images, surround sound, haptic feedback and motion tracking.
Examples: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Gear VR, PlayStation VR, Google Cardboard, 360° videos
Augmented Reality (AR)
Augmented Reality supplements the real world with virtual objects or...