04/07/2022

Last week, I found a project to serve as my individual capstone project a.k.a.an Amateur radio satellite tracking ARKit project.

The premise of the project is “Tracking satellites with on-board ham radio capabilities is a lot of fun, but there’s no easy to use source on where to point your antenna. I’d like to take advantage of Apple’s ARKit to not only tell me what frequency to use, but will also orient me so I know where to aim.”

This week, while waiting to hear back from my project sponsor I spent time reading up on the latest features of ARKit 5. Highlights of ARKit’s latest feature set that could prove useful in my project include

• Improvements to Motion Tracking
• Improved Location Anchors, the latter enabling developers to place AR experiences at specific locations.
• Scene Geometry / advanced scene understanding capabilities built into the LiDAR Scanner

Having never coded in Swift myself, I also began watching “Lecture 1: Course Logistics and Introduction to SwiftUI” with Stanford’s Paul Hegarty.