Week 3 - Markerless AR

 

This week we were presented with markerless augmented reality. The main difference between this and marker based is the need for a marker. Markerless will use the environment to try and make markers on which to project objects we want to place. The setup for the projects are easy as the packages needed for markerless AR are easily available on unity hub.

The requirement for this project is to make an educational app. We decided to spend this week each working on an idea and make a small prototype to try and get a feel for markerless AR and to have something to start a project with. Here are the ideas we came up with:

Tobias:

My idea for a project is a history education app where the user can see real life scale models of historical weapons like the trebuchet. To make the app more interesting, we can add animations to the weapon, to allow it to go through the different stages of using the weapon. Additionally, we can add information screens for each of the stages, so the user can learn about how that weapon was used and what the purpose of the weapon was. The main challenges of this app would be to implement some animations, implement some scripts for the user interface buttons and to allow the user to scale the models, since trebuchets are massive. Initially we could start with only the trebuchet, but more weapons could be added if time permits.

Trebuchet Asset

 

Dalius:

Summon an AR Object (Car, Human, etc.) and control him with buttons spawned on the screen.

For instance: Person starts an app, press on a place where he wants to spawn an Object, according to the indicator location, Object has been spawned and buttons with directions have been spawned (Forward, backward, left, right). So now, if AR Camera has enough information about the environment, you can press buttons to walk model straight, back, etc. Later, if there is spare time left, interaction between 2 of the objects could be made. Likewise: Object 1 hits Object 2 and plays sound, or Object 1 and Object 2 goes to animation phase, such like: Talking, Dancing, etc.

Yujing:

Idea of AR Markerless project: A Portal to a museum.

What in this application is:

1.       When opening the app, there is a door.

2.       Enter the gate

3.       To a museum which is a 360-video showing the whole view of the museum.

With this application, you can stay at home and have a trip to one of the world most famous museum.

The door is a portal with a plane that will divide the virtual world and the reality which is triggered by the distance of the camara and the “portal plane”. Walking through the portal, the virtual world is consisted of a sphere of 50 times scaling to contain the video.

Project future: for the future development, there can be more “doors” to more places with more specific introduction videos of the museum.

Entrance to Museum

Jalil:

we discussed in our team that each member of the group make a prototype AR project for the next time we meet and then we decide which prototype or project is the best for the hand-in.

Balloon shooting

when the application starts, multiple balloons will start flying after 4 seconds you have a button and target icon to aim and shoot the balloons one at a time. once you shoot a balloon it makes a pop sound and it turns to smokes.

For this project I used AR Foundation, ARCore.

What I learned in this project:

-          Create objects

-          Animate the objects

-          Use RaycastHit

-          Create your own button

-          Use smoke

-          Use sound

-          BoxCollider

-          Player Setting for building for android

 

We decided on using the medieval weapons idea as basis for our project. We have split the tasks so that everyone gets to try and work on an aspect of the project that involves some scripting. We will be using git to distribute the project but since it is a single scene we will use the import/export assets feature in unity to try and merge the features we each develop.