Kids Day 2017: PIRATE AR
Project: Pirate AR (App and Experience)
Role: Developer, Designer
Platforms: Augmented Reality Game
Technology: Unity (3D), Xcode
Role: Developer, Designer
Platforms: Augmented Reality Game
Technology: Unity (3D), Xcode
“Pirates” was the theme for 2017’s Kids Day - and it was decided early on that two technologies would be featured: AR and VR. In order to service as many children as possible, I chose to use the “colored image-to-3D” approach for AR (similar to the “Crayon City of Heroes” from 2015). But unlike 2015’s passive experience, this experience would allow children to use AR to look around a 3D world and find their custom colored pirate ship.
The first step was to build the scanning app. As native iOS app, it utilized the Vision Framework to take a picture, detect the rectangular edges of the template and automatically return the image to the correct ratio. Via an alpha channel template, I then punched out the customized pieces and merged them into a master texture (which also allowed the children to tint all non-customized parts of the ship with a color of their choice.)
The 3D portion of the experience was designed in Unity. For the AR marker, I decided to use a stylized version of the map itself. Since the goal was allowing kids to zoom in to any portion of the map, I had to experiment and add additional details to build up marker complexity - allowing the kids to stay keyed in during close ups and fast movement.
For the Kids Day event, the map/marker was printed at ~5 ft x ~3 ft. As children added their ships, they would animate around the world in predetermined paths - allowing the kids to see an AR pirate world with not only their ship, but all other ships designed throughout the day.
