Browsing by Author "Zhang, Kevin"

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    VR4GETAR
    Renugopal, Jishnu; Zargarpur, Mattin; Zhao, Haiyu; Richardson, Christian; Zhang, Kevin; Schmidt, Will (Virginia Tech, 2017-04-28)
    Global Event and Trend Archive Research (GETAR) is supported by NSF (IIS-1619028 and 1619371) through 2019. It will devise interactive, integrated, digital library/archive systems coupled with linked and expert-curated webpage/tweet collections. This project will act as a supplement to GETAR by providing a Virtual Reality (VR) interface to visualize geospatial data and extrapolate meaningful information from it. It will primarily focus on visualizing tweets and images obtained from the GETAR data archive on a globe in a VR world. This will be accomplished using tools like Unity, HTC Vive, C# and Git. In order to ensure that the product meets the end user’s specification, this project will use an iterative workflow with a very short feedback loop. The feedback obtained from Dr. Fox and our team members will be used to make subsequent prototypes and the final product. Our project is intended to be used as a demo by school children interested in data analytics and data sciences. Additionally, this project can also be extended to add features to our end product. Our final product can display images and tweets on a globe in a VR world provided that they have location information. As part of our final deliverable, we delivered a report, a presentation, a video demo and a GitHub repository containing the source code for our project. During this project, our team learned that building a 3D application is very different from building a 2D desktop application. We also learned that it is crucial to meticulously document all parts of product development to assist future development.
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    Wildlife Tracker App
    Zhang, Boshen; Wang, Muyang; Kou, Ziwei (James); Zhang, Kevin (Virginia Tech, 2021-12-14)
    In the previous semester, Dr. Luis E. Escobar from the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation initiated a project called Wildlife Diseases Tracker App to help with his research studies. The original project aimed to provide a free-of-cost mobile application with a website to accomplish early detection of wildlife diseases. During this current semester, our goal was to update and finalize a new version based on the previous project and work on the continuation of the smartphone application and the website to track wildlife diseases in real-time. The project has two divisions: a mobile application and a website. The goal for the mobile application is to update and expand it with the capacity to take photos and get the geolocation and date of the photo. It is able to record metadata and upload data to the server. The website is updated with the functionality to summarize the data and images collected for analysis, mapping. We wished for the implementation of a cross-platform mobile application; however, due to technical difficulties and time constraints, we could only update and finalize the existing IOS version of the smartphone application. For our IOS application, we conducted tests and fixed existing bugs based on the project done by the previous group. We also improved the existing Upload functionalities by adding more input fields. Some new functions were also implemented including Map functionality and login credentials. A Face ID/Touch ID for users was also created for easy login. As for the website, an updated version of the home page was constructed with basic information about our project, and instructions for downloading and using the application. We also updated the map and the spreadsheet, so it displays and provide downloadable data to users. To test, we released a beta version and sent out questionnaires and surveys for students and collaborators to examine functionalities, aesthetics, and accessibility. The final deliverables for this semester project include the updated versions of the website and the iOS mobile application, a final report that explains all aspects and details of our project, and a final presentation slide deck which we used to display what we have accomplished throughout the semester in the class, our client, Dr. Escobar, and Professor Fox. We would like to see our effort made in this project helpful to both students participating in related studies and to our client, Dr. Escobar.