Introduction
This being the first assignment for the XRD course, the goal is not too complex and just aims to introduce us to simple AR/VR concepts. As such, there aren't a lot of technologies to cover besides Vuforia, an augmented reality software development kit for mobile devices. It focuses on tracking images and 3D objects, therefore we thought to use one of the most useful "images" of the world as the subject of this assignment, the map.
We decided to create an app that uses a camera to detect images of flags and then shows the country highlighted on a map. The purpose of it is mainly educational as it can be used to teach children, or anyone, more about the world in an interactive way. As an early prototype we limited functionality only to the feature mentioned above, but it can be expanded indefinitely to different maps and flags from all time periods. In addition, we are sure that more functionalities can be added to this simple application, maybe even made in a game or course, but that is beyond the scope of this assignment.
Now I will go more in detail with what we have and how we did it.
Firstly, we further added a limitation only to the European continent as it's most commonly shown or found on the internet. The same goes for the highlight of the countries as political matters are not part of this assignment.
Secondly, we tried to implement everything to work on a phone but we found it difficult for multiple reasons:
1) 2/3 phones, as far as we researched it, are not compatible with a basic set-up in unity and the app would not work without using additional emulators
2) the last phone requires an app that is not available on windows
This means we only focused making it work on a laptop camera, which it does. Therefore, we didn't spend more time on trying to make it work on a phone, at least for this first assignment.
Lastly, the way we implemented it is by adding several "ImageTarget" game objects in unity, which have a child of plane type which contains the map with the respective country highlighted. When a flag is displayed in front of the camera, the respective map will show. We used the phone to test this, but a small problem we encountered while testing was that it was a bit inconsistent, due to the phone's glossy screen. We tested with a limited number of flags on normal surfaces and it became more consistent, so paper flags are the way to go.
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| Albania showing on the plane map |
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| ImageTargets in unity |
And with that, I will close off by mentioning that all three of us worked in a pair programming manner with minimal version control, due to the small scale of the assigment. Plus, in the following days/weeks we will try to fix any bugs/errors, as some flags are harder to recognize than others.
Author: Ioan Catalin Alexandru
Video presentation:
Github repository:
https://github.com/AlexJurj12/XRDFirstAssignment
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