INSTRUCTIONS FOR DOWNLOADING COFFEE CUP DEMO
TO ANDROID HANDSET:
If you have a copy of my AIE graduate business card, you can download the app to view the coffee cup as below. Here;’s the link to my Android AR App:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/72299624/coffeeCardDemo.apk
Don’t have a copy? No worries! I have customised this for you so you can STILL view a gorgeous AR coffee cup in glorious 3D. Once you’ve downloaded the app from the above link from my Dropbox, simply install it, run it, and point it at the image further below. If you want to see it, scroll down past my little rant just beneath!
Now then,
For my next trick….just kidding.
No really.
In this post I wanted to show you a side piece of work I produced which served two purposes:
1. Another demo for my portfolio of works based on my research of AR.
2. Just to really try and impress the hell out of people and hopefully score a bid in advertising for cafes!
While the latter may be a pipe dream for now, the former was achievable, and has been achieved.
Gratefully, I acknowledge my good friend Karl, a master digital artist who at the time of this post, has also been attending the Academy of Interactive Entertainment.
His expertise produced a 3D coffee cup model that allowed me to texture it to my liking and implement on top of my trackable marker.
The trackable marker itself was an image that I borrowed from good ol’ Google Images. The link to the image is provided below:
http://www.dailytechbits.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Stock__Coffee_Beans_by_unamanic.jpg
In terms of scaling the model to fit the bounds of users’ Android viewing devices, I had to play around with various sizes. The size I eventually settled for will generate reasonably once you can track the marker with your Android device. I did find I had to keep my device fairly stable to render the 3D model on screen.
The screenshot of the result is provided below:
Custom ImageMarker Project using Vuforia extension for Unity.
During the first build of the Android app (.apk), I almost panicked when no 3D model generated on top of the marker image. My first thoughts were that I violated one of the guidelines of creating a suitable trackable for the AR app. See the caption “Coffee For Two?” below the trackable in the above image?
Well image trackables do require that there is a border of whitespace around the trackable image in order to “distinguish” the bounds of what to track in order to spit back a 3D model. How much is required though is unspecified. Covering the caption with a piece of blank white paper did not appear to solve that problem.
Reopening the project within Unity, I checked the DataSets and images attached to the AR camera. And there I found my problem. The DataSet must have been reset to Vuforia’s default “woodchips” XML, and the image to be tracked was the corresponding ‘woodchips’ image. Oh dear!
Reimporting the proper DataSet and image resulted in the pretty floating coffee cup you see above. By adding a simple RotateObject script in C#, I was also able to allow the viewer the pleasure of viewing the 3D cup from all sides without having to turn the printout one bit.
