War of Insects is a mobile application that was designed and developed as part of the Exploration module in my third year of my Digital Media course at University of Salford. As part of the brief we had to be split into groups of three and all collaborate together to develop a mobile application with the functionalities of Augmented Reality. Each member of the group had a specific job title (Storyteller, Designer and Developer). I had the title of developer so my role was to take the idea and design created by my two group colleagues and develop the application using Unity.
The target audience for War of Insects is aimed mainly towards children as the application is used for educational purposes which allows users to read up on information about specific insects to which they can then sue the camera lens of their smartphones to display a 3D model of the insect.
My plan for the AR feature and app build will be focused on the use of Unity which will have 3rd party packages imported (VUFORIA) to allow users to view the 3D models. With VUFORIA it will allow me to set a target image to which the AR camera lens will pick up and trigger the 3D model to appear on the users screens.
First step is to create a new scene in Unity and to import the Vuforia package from the Vuforia website. Once the package is imported successfully, I can then remove the main camera and add the AR camera via the hierarchy tab.
https://developer.vuforia.com/
With the scene setup now, I need to add the chosen target images designed by Yueh-Chen to the Vuforia database to check for the Augmentable rating. This is to show if the AR camera lens will pick up the target image to trigger the models without any issues. 5* meaning it will work fine and 1* meaning it will not appear at all.
As you can see from the image below all target images didn’t reach 5* but if it is 3 or above it will still trigger the AR.
The models that are used were found by Yueh-Chen from the site 3DModels.com. We have 3 models in total, Spider, Bee and Ant. Importing the models into Unity is fairly simple, first I needed to create a folder for them and add it to the assets folder within the project, followed by a simple drag and drop onto their specific scene where I would then scale and resize the models to fit the target images to make the result very clear for the users to see.
When adding the model to the target image it is important that they are grouped together in the hierarchy tab as this keeps the model stable on the target image.
Taking the design layout created by my team member I am now to create the UI segments of the application using Unity.
The aim of the app is to display 3D models of insects to users on a physical playing card that is double sided, one side with the info of the insect and the back displaying the target image which triggers the AR functionality.
