R34 Airship Project - Week 2 - First Look at AR

In the 2nd week of this project, we decided to gain some knowledge of some of the ideas that we had for our project.

I started by looking at some of the different kind of AR techniques. I started with ARToolKit, however, that is built for an older version of unity and some features do not work such as the camera, which is essential for AR, so I decided to find another solution.

Upon doing some more research, I found out that Google's AR core has a unity package available for testing. I created a project with this and it worked in the editor, the problem with this was that very few phones support AR Core so our potential users would have been very limited.

It wasn't until after this that I found out that unity has Vuforia built in which is a really easy to setup and reliable AR system, it also has the ability to track specific pictures that I can add myself. The first thing I did once I had figured out the system, I found a picture of the R34 airship that I added to the Vuforia database and printed off.

Making something appear when the image is seen by the camera was very simple, I dragged in an image target from the Vuforia files, selected the image from the database I imported. I then added an airship model I made. I added a script to it to make it spin just so that I know how the system works.

Interaction Between Objects

Next, I wanted to have events trigger when the picture is detected and lost, this would allow me to trigger an animation or a function whenever the picture comes into sight of the camera. I used this to trigger an animation that made it look like the airship was raising from the ground when the camera found the image.

I also looked into interaction between different AR objects, I don't have any plans to do this with the project, however, I wanted to see if it was possible so that in the future I know more about what is possible with the AR tools.