This project came to life during the first months of the first Covid19 lockdown. Everyone had to stay at home and so it happened that the organizers of the cultural hackathon Coding da Vinci moved everything into the internet. I read about it on Twitter and asked a friend, who I worked with on a previous hackathon, if he would be in for another project and we agreed to take on a new coding adventure.
After a few hours of online meetings, we found two more team members and we had the idea to bring event posters with augmented reality to life. We wanted to set up a platform where users can share the pictures they took during the event, and (after a sanity check of course) these pictures would appear in AR on the event poster.
For the final day of the hackathon, a WordPress plugin as well as a Unity App were developed to showcase the imagined functionality. Anyone can upload pictures to event posters, and App users are able to explore them with their smartphone in AR.
Furthermore, we tried to get everything working with WebAR, such that no app would be needed. But all the free WebAR options were performing poorly.
For this project, our team won the category “Most technical”.
My main tasks for this project were:
- Developing the WordPress plugin / backend
- Developing the AR app
Some facts about the project:
- Pictures in the AR will always reappear in the same spot
- The backend serves low resolution pictures for the AR view and high resolution pictures for the image viewer
- A caching algorithm was put in place such that images do not need to be redownloaded in the future.
The project page: https://codingdavinci.de/de/projekte/atondes-virtual-exploration
The entire project can be found on GitLab and is licensed under CC0 & MIT license: https://gitlab.com/atondes
If you have an idea for an innovative and customized app prototype that you would like to bring to life, I would be thrilled to help you with the development process. Please contact me here.
