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A Designers New Years Resolution

You’ll hear a million resolutions of “New Year, New Me” posts, blogs, tweets, messages, etc. What’s different about mine? None. The only vague difference is that I’m making them as a designer and a guy who runs a youtube page. There’s nothing special about this blog post that is any different than you’d see anywhere else. The unique flavor is that it’s me. If you know me, want to know what’s happening and what I’m hoping to happen, then keep on reading!

This year was a little more crazy than usual.  I won’t go into detail on the negatives, but here’s are some positive defining moments in 2018 for me:

  • I was published in .net magazine for a a small page about my youtube gaming channel
  • I broke out of my rut at work and just started designing what I wanted, and it worked heavily in my favor
  • I finished a 6k Spartan Obstacle Course Race
  • I completed a design challenge for .net magazine that will be published in 2019
  • I started on the path to learn AR

 

I think it was a pretty decent year, but I have some plans for the new year as well. When I look back on this post a year from now and I see 30% of it completed, I would of considered it a success.

 

Career Goals

Finish up some backlog courses on Udemy

I have dozens of courses I just buy on the cheap and sit on. There’s a ton of cool subjects that I wish I’d jump into, but I never have. The majority of it is development courses, but quite a few are Unity and game dev courses.  This brings me to my next design goals

Launch an AR app

I’ve been learning about it, but I think if I make a goal of launching something, i’ll probably be able to make it happen. I have an idea I’ve been working on, but never came to light due to technical stupidity I guess you’d say.

Update My Personal Brand

As a designer, we all say we’ll reinvent ourselves. I don’t plan on reinventing myself at all. I tend to be more consistent throughout my personal brand. This includes my website, portfolio, resume and online social presence. This is primarily to potentially get some freelance work this year.

Obtain 3 Freelance Clients

I’ve been out of the game and working in house for the past few years. I plan on opening my web design experience to helping other people build their business.

Get 1000 Subscribers on my Youtube Channel

I run a gaming channel over at www.youtube.com/thenowgamingzone  It’s a video game channel I run that hasn’t been getting as much love as I’d like it too. With the help of my family, I plan on creating a plan to get to the 1000 sub mark so that I’m able to monetize the channel again.

 

 

i could go on and on, but I figure this should be plenty enough to share with the world. If anybody needs an accountability partner for their design or development needs, then reach out to me on social media

Twitter: https://twitter.com/cliffn

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cliffnowicki/

 

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Artificial Intelligence Bots – First Attempts

There’s no blog post today, but instead I’ll give a quick heads up on what’s going on. I’ve been busy with family things and enjoying the last few weeks of summer with my boys before they go back to school.

I have been playing around with wit.ai, a ai bot website, where I intense to create my own bot for an AR app. I’m still working on a course where I will use the bot to be able to voice control my app and tell it to do things. I’m not sure how, as I’m not to the voice part yet. However, I’ve bee teaching it new things and plan to keep it open to the public. Since the app is essentially a car model with interactive pieces, the voice control will let me say “Open the doors” and then then doors will open. It’s been real fun teaching the bot.

The entire time I kept thinking how I could make a Jarvis from the Iron Man movies. Little steps first! My hope is high with AR right now. I plan on look more into other ai bot creators and give a quick overview for other beginners like me.

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Cliffs AR / VR Life Recap – July 23rd – 29th

It was a pretty fun week as my focused was changed to VR momentarily. I picked up a headset that is also good to use with AR and spent a lot of time downloading random apps.

News:

Augmented Reality Puts the Magic in ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Cards

This was really awesome to see. In the beginning of my AR idea list, Magic the Gathering took top of it. The concept seemed simple to have stats pop out and somehow mix with each other. This news article shows just some simple tricks, like video and what appears to be language changing, which is great for those who came across foreign cards but would really like to read them.

Hardware:

Merge VR 

This was the headset I picked up for only $14.99 on sale at Microcenter. You can click on the link above for Amazon who has it currently for $29.99, but if you’re anywhere near a Microcenter and love going there, go check it out to see if it’s still on the cheap!

VR Videos:

Clouds over Sidra

“Meet Sidra. This charming 12-year-old girl will guide you through her temporary home: The Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan. Zaatari is home to 130,000 Syrians fleeing violence and war, and children make up half the camp’s population. In this lyrical VR film, Sidra leads you through her daily life: Eating, sleeping, learning and playing in the vast desert city of tents.”
This being my first official video in full VR, I was hooked! This will forever be the one I compare all things too since it’s that first video on a headset.

Apps:

VR Thrills

This is the first thing I found on the app store when I got my headset. I always wanted to go on roller coasters, but after a few times, I had to stop because i’m just not a roller coaster guy. I wouldn’t say this is the best app, but it’s what I tried. I kept freezing and the quality was very poor.

Movies:

Ready Player One

After reading the book, I was excited to finally watch this movie on Blu-Ray. While it doesn’t stay fully true to the book, the entire concept is there and it does a pretty decent job of at least keeping things together.

That’s all for this week. Make sure to check back throughout the week for any random posts and until next week, see ya!

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Cliffs AR Life Recap – July 16th – 22nd

It feels like a lot of stuff has happened in the past week with injuries and everything. I’ve finished the book “Common Sense, the Turing Test, and the Quest for Real  AI” and it turned out to be a pretty interesting read. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for in reading it, but I came out with some new ideas. I’ve also dove more into the Udemy course by Diego Herrera called “Discover Voice Controlled AR Apps”. In It I did a quick 10 minute Unity / Vuforia demo where it was essentially creating a scene that used my webcam as I raise my phone to show a picture of a Lamborghini. The screen would then show a 3D lambo I placed on it. Old and boring to most, but fascinating to me! My screen came out all janky when trying to screen record it, so I’m looking more into OBS to figure out the issue.

Anyways, here’s some random resources I came across this past week, hope you enjoy!

News:

Next Reality 

I just found this site today looking for AR news. There’s tons of sources I use for web design and development, but being new to the space I had no idea where to go for AR stuff. If there’s any AR or related sites out there such as VR, then please let me know!

Unity 2018.2 Is Out

I meant to post this last week but forgot, but it’s worth downloading the latest and greatest if you’re new like me.

Books:

To go with the Udemy course I been doing, there’s a portion of the course to teach that says it’ll teach Machine Learning. It’s most likely on a small scale, but I decided to check out the subject matter with a few books that I plan on reading, this time with affiliates!

 

I feel like I’m not 100% sure on what goes into an AR resource post. If there’s something glaring that I’m just flat out missing or a particular focus, then let me know! I’m also not sure exactly what to call this weekly round up of AR related things I find. It feels like it’s just missing the point for a serious AR post or something. I’ll possibly come up with some tester names over the next few weeks to see what works best.

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It was a pretty fun week as my focused was changed to VR momentarily. I picked up a headset that is also good to use with AR and spent a lot of time downloading random apps.

News:

Augmented Reality Puts the Magic in ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Cards

This was really awesome to see. In the beginning of my AR idea list, Magic the Gathering took top of it. The concept seemed simple to have stats pop out and somehow mix with each other. This news article shows just some simple tricks, like video and what appears to be language changing, which is great for those who came across foreign cards but would really like to read them.

Hardware:

Merge VR 

This was the headset I picked up for only $14.99 on sale at Microcenter. You can click on the link above for Amazon who has it currently for $29.99, but if you’re anywhere near a Microcenter and love going there, go check it out to see if it’s still on the cheap!

VR Videos:

Clouds over Sidra

“Meet Sidra. This charming 12-year-old girl will guide you through her temporary home: The Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan. Zaatari is home to 130,000 Syrians fleeing violence and war, and children make up half the camp’s population. In this lyrical VR film, Sidra leads you through her daily life: Eating, sleeping, learning and playing in the vast desert city of tents.”
This being my first official video in full VR, I was hooked! This will forever be the one I compare all things too since it’s that first video on a headset.

Apps:

VR Thrills

This is the first thing I found on the app store when I got my headset. I always wanted to go on roller coasters, but after a few times, I had to stop because i’m just not a roller coaster guy. I wouldn’t say this is the best app, but it’s what I tried. I kept freezing and the quality was very poor.

Movies:

Ready Player One

After reading the book, I was excited to finally watch this movie on Blu-Ray. While it doesn’t stay fully true to the book, the entire concept is there and it does a pretty decent job of at least keeping things together.

That’s all for this week. Make sure to check back throughout the week for any random posts and until next week, see ya!