Day 3

Links of the day:

UNITY / AR KIT / AR KIT 2:

Building your Unity game to an iOS device for testing

What’s new in Unity ARKit Plugin for ARKit 2 - Unity Blog

ARWorldMap Shareable World

Ar Shared Experience

Unity releases a plugin to try AR KIT 2

Shared Experience:

USDZ Universal format for AR

USDZ Universal format for AR

User-generated AR content / Snapchat / Lens Studio

Facebook Motion capture AR Costumes

Reference project Reddit Place

• The main task in the morning was to come up with one set up what we are going to build and test on Friday. The thing what we could be done better was to keep in mind the end thing what are we building while thinking about the feasibility. We had a clear direction that we will work with shared experiences and explore that field and have few possibilities for setups:

1. A dedicated virtual space for people for sharing the content. The main inspiration comes from a sculpture in Rome and probably this set up will be used during the final demo of the workshop.
2. Simple drawing in the space and sharing the experience with others. (requires AR KIT 2 or another idea how to share the same scene in two different devices)
3. Leaving a drawing in a particular space and find it by someone else (requires using AR KIT 2 and persistent tracking)
4. AR meet up where every person wears an augmented costume (just for fun but turns out Facebook is about to do it)

• In order to decide which set up we should build and test until Friday demo we divided into groups and did a desk research about the feasibility by checking resources about Unity, AR Kit, Ar Kit 2, a plugin released by Unity to test AR Kit 2 functionalities and to get more insights on experience itself by looking what kind of shared experience AR projects are already there and what are approaches of companies that have projects in this field. We identified few types of objects used in shared experience AR scenarios: 3D objects, Merged 3D and 2D objects (Snapchat Lens studio is using GIPHY API to place 2D GIFs into 3D scenes and the outcome is pretty interesting), dialog boxes that could be accessed through different media.
• After the research, we went out for a team walk to test a running example of Unity Scene that allows us to draw with a particle system in 3D space.

While trying the technology we saw potential in several aspects of possible future interactions and decided to go on with shared drawing experience.

• In the studio we defined 3 steps to check the feasibility of the future set up by dividing the work into 3 parts:

1. A shared scene, how can we achieve that two devices would share the same scene and see all manipulations live?
2. A persistent scene, figure out do we need to use a physical object detection for anchoring the scene?
3. What is inside a Unity drawing script, how can we manipulate the brush?

• By the end of the day we have 3 build options:

1. Build the scene using AR KIT 2 (lacks of resources, examples and documentation online)
2. Build the scene using Unity plugin for AR Kit and send position variables via SPACEBREW
3. Build the scene using ARCore (The communication between devices isn't live)