Final Week Documentation

Wow! I can’t believe that it’s the final week already.

As I wrote last week, this week I was trying to figure out how to use Unity to draw doodles in the environment. Fortunately, I was able to find tutorials and demo code online that helped a TON.

Tutorial/Code Resources:

• Dilmer Valecillos’ AR Draw with AR Anchor Manager (Part 1, Part 2)

• Github Repo for the code used in the demo (link)

I can’t take credit for any of the code, but I was excited that I got my idea to work on my phone!

Trying to draw 3D doodle hearts on top of dog

Drawing fun faces!

A Recording of my iPhone demo

Placing Objects on Plane with Unity AR

This week, I went through a number of tutorials trying to learn more about Unity, scripting, and AR Foundation. With following along with a number of tutorials, I was able to get to a point where I coded a test app.

This week I learned:

• How to use ARFoundation to track planes

• How to script using C# in Unity

• Place objects on a plane

• How to place multiple objects on a plane

With trying out the tutorials, I learned a lot. One of which is that having pre-made flat planes are really limiting because you will always see how ‘flat’ they are! So next up is hoping to create a way to ‘draw’ in 3D. Hopefully something like this:

The Next Steps for me is checking out these tutorials and following through:

• AR Draw with AR Anchor Manager (Part 1)

• Unity AR Foundation - AR Draw Adding Multi-Touch Support (Part 2)

• Code Repo for above tutorials

Also maybe…

• Using ARCore and Unity3D to Draw Lines in Augmented Reality

• Make an AR Drawing App

• Creating An Augmented Reality Application with Unity3d from an Idea to the App store

First foray into Unity and AR

Wow! It’s been a wild week of trying to learn unity and make something at the same time. This is my first project in Unity ever, so there were lots of learnings.

I went through these tutorials:

Build Augmented Reality (AR) apps with ARFOUNDATION & Unity by Dinesh Tavaslkar on Udemy

Unity AR tutorial playlist by Dev Enabled on YouTube

I think the latter helped me a bit more into doing the AR portion of Unity, but the first was very helpful in learning the foundations of Unity. I still can’t get around Unity well (lots of option clicking and dragging and trying to see stuff in the viewport), but I think I’m starting to get the hang of it.

This week I was trying to do image tracking with my iPhone per Rui’s demo in class. What I thought would be a simple task actually turned into a quite long one with many technical hurdles.

At first, I made an image like this trying to use this as an image tracker:

… and it totally didn’t work. I guess there was contrast but not enough angles for the image tracking to work. After trying out a few photos, I found out that funny enough, this crab worked (random image taken from the internet). After lots of technical hurdles, I figured I would try to get something working technically.

This crab was able to be tracked, with its cute little eyes.

It took a long time, but I was able to get one of the drawings I made from before to be tracked with this little crab image! I need to do more work on finessing the cube (you can see how it’s a very thin cube with textures all around its side), but I’m just relieved that the tracking aspect worked.

Finally found an image that would track, a crab!

For next time, I really want to figure out how I can make my drawings be suspended in the air WITHOUT all the noise and random stuff. Not sure if this is an issue I have to solve by modeling everything? Or maybe I should be using 2D textures and not 3d cubes? Will have to do more tutorials and investigate.

Thinking About AR

This week for Magic Windows and Mixed Up Realities, I am thinking about how I’d like to augment my surrounding space.

Just thinking off the bat, I would love to be able to draw things from memory and then use AR to make them come alive. In these times, I find myself reminiscing about people that I have hung out with in the past, or how things used to be. I think it would be meaningful to me if I were to try to recreate little snippets of memories that I would like to surround my environment with.

That in itself is a pretty ambiguous statement, so here is a sample drawing of what it would be like. The environment would be my backyard, and the drawing represents a memory that I have of my friend coming over and playing with my dog. (The doodle does not represent the level of finesse, but I think it would be neat to have a hand-drawn element to the experience.)

As part of the pre-class work, I was reading a post on Vuforia on ‘Best Practices for Designing and Developing Image-Based Targets’. In a nutshell, it seems that the attributes of an ideal image target is to be rich in detail, good contrast, no repeating patterns, and to be in a suitable file format.

I wonder where the AR journey will go!