AR – Application Development Cloud

AR Art Overlay Prototype

Using AR to bring an art piece to life has rapidly turned into an active and exciting art genre. I was contacted by an artist looking for new ways to share their art with the world. They asked if I would be able to prototype an AR app that will take their finished art pieces and make it deeper by adding audio, animations, and information to the existing piece. I decided to create a prototype to help determine the feasibility of this idea.

I chose my cyber warrior ai art piece

I then enhance it with special FX, artist information, and audio.

Here is a video of the final presentation. The artist is very interested in moving forward with some exciting new projects.

Skills demonstrated in this prototype:

AR Development
Develop AR experiences that use trackable targets in the environment
Build AR projects to mobile devices
Create basic application interactions with Visual Scripting
AR Design
Research future AR use cases to prepare for developing new kinds of applications
Evaluate platform capabilities and limitations in order to determine whether or not a given feature will work.

Augmented Reality AI Character

One of the most exciting uses for augmented reality is to display AI characters into the real world. I was challenged to use the knowledge I have gained in the field of AR to produce a prototype that would place a life-size 3D character into the real world.

AR Face Filter

New recruits use facial tracking filters to take memorable “selfies”

These days most folks are familiar with facial tracking and recognition technology. It has become quite commonplace to have the camera track your face while in a zoom meeting. Who hasn’t been able to resist adding cat ears or a king’s crown to your video feed while the boss drones away during a meeting?

Markerless AR

Markerless Augmented Reality Development Environment

This type of augmented reality technology is called markerless AR. Using this technique you do not need to program an image Target to project your metaverse scene into the real world. Instead the AR engine is analyzing the environment and detecting a ground plane. When the ground plane is detected the reticule will align and you may then project a 3D object or environment that will stay locked in at those exact coordinates.

A/R Virtual Button

Image Target with 3D objects hovering over

We’ve covered the basics of AR targeting in the first few lessons and now we move on to an exciting feature: a virtual button that can recognize when you are touching it. I used Photoshop and designed a custom image Target in the style of a game board. There are placeholders for 3D models of a cube and a sphere, and there is a “button” as well.

The completed scene when run on your Android device will recognize button press and switch from a sphere to a cube hovering over the game board display.

viewing the image Target game board through the camera of an Android device.

The possibilities for interactive displays and art exhibits are endless. I look forward to seeing how this technology will grow and develop to be used more in the future. Feel free to contact me if you need any projects completed using this amazing technology.

Download the APK here https://meta.dwdenney.com/ARVirtualButton.apk and try it with this image target:

A/R Enhanced Comic Books

With this fun project I set out to enhance comic books using augmented reality technology. I chose a few covers from some of my favorites and tried to follow the theme of the comic book cover while adding augmented reality enhancements. The 3D objects and animations that enhance the scene when viewed through a camera seem to be a perfect combination.

Building on what I learned in my first project, I made five different AR targets and programmed each one with a different augmented reality effect. Some of them are quite complex such as smoke coming out of the chimney of a house and even characters that attempt to attack an enemy.

The first one is the cover of one of my beloved childhood comic book characters: Garfield. What could be better than looking at the cover through a camera and seeing Garfield trying to devour a steaming cheeseburger.

Augmented Reality Application with Clothing Image Target

In this exciting project I created an augmented reality (A/R) application with a clothing based Image Target using the Unity 3D engine and A/R camera recognition.

DeeDub’s workspace in the Unity 3D engine

This application will let you view through your camera and see your surroundings enhanced with augmented reality. When the camera recognizes a certain image that has been programmed in, it’s able to place a 3D animated character on surface of the image.

I programmed the camera to recognize a “Live Happy” logo that is on my wife’s apron. When the camera recognizes the logo it projects a 3D animated action figure walking around the logo. Once the image is tracked and the AR recognition has locked in place, you can move the device around and watch the AR camera match your movements.

Feel free to check out the APK (you’ll need to sideload it via developer mode on an Android device). One you load up the APK and install it on your device, open the app and point the camera at this logo: