Posts Tagged ‘ ARK

Augmenting a Roman Fort

The following video shows something that I have been working on as a prototype for a larger landscape AR project.

As you can see, by using the Qualcomm AR SDK and Unity3D it is possible to augment some quite complex virtual objects and information onto the model Roman fort. I really like this application, as all I have done is take a book that you can buy at any heritage site (in the UK at least) and simply changed the baseboard design so that the extra content can be experienced. Obviously there was quite a lot of coding behind the scenes in the app and 3D modelling, but from a user point of view the AR content is very easy to see – simply print out the new baseboard, stick it on and load up the app.

For me that is one of the beautiful things about AR, you still have the real world, you still have the real fort that you have made and can play with it whether or not you have an iPad or Android tablet or what-have-you. All the AR does is augment that experience and allow you to play around with virtual soldiers or peasants or horses instead of using static model ones. It also opens up all sorts of possibilities for adding explanations of building types, a view into the day-to-day activities in a fort, or even for telling stories and acting out historical scenarios.

The relative ease of the deployment of the system (now that I have the code for the app figured out!) means this type of approach could be rolled out in all sorts of different situations. Some of my favourite things in museums, for instance, are the old-school dioramas and scale-models. The skill and craftsmanship of the original model will remain, but it could be augmented by the use of the app – and made to come alive.

The model of Housesteads fort in the Housesteads museum

The same is true of modern day prototyping models or architectural models. As humans we are used to looking at models of things, and want to be able to touch them and move them around. Manipulating them on a computer screen just doesn’t somehow seem quite right. But the ability to combine the virtual data, with the manipulation and movement of the real-life model gives us a unique and enhanced viewpoint, and can also allow us to visualise new buildings or exisiting buildings in new ways.

A particularly important consideration when creating AR content is to ensure that it looks as believable or ‘real’ as possible. The human eye is very good at noticing things that seem out of the ordinary or “don’t feel quite right”. One of the main ways to help with creating a believable AR experience  is to ensure the real-world occludes the virtual objects. That is the virtual content can be seen to move behind the real-world objects (such as the soldiers walking through the model gateway). Also it should be possible to interact with the real-world objects and have that affect the virtual content (such as touching one of the buildings and making the labels appear). This will become particularly important as I move into rolling the system out into a landscape instead of just a scale-model. As I augment the real world with virtual objects, those objects have to interact with the real-world as if they are part of it – otherwise too many Breaks in Presence will occur and the value of the AR content is diminished. An accurate 3D model of the real-world is quite a bit harder to create than that of a paper fort, but if I can pull it off, the results promise to be quite a bit more impressive…

 

ARK and Augmented Reality

Recently I have been working away in the Unity gaming engine using it to make some Augmented Reality applications for the iPhone and iPad. It is surprisingly successful and with at least 3 different ways of getting 3D content to overlay on the iOS video feed (Qualcomm, StringAR and UART) the workflow is more open than ever. I have been attempting to load 3D content at runtime, so that dynamic situations can be created as a result of user interaction – rather than having to have all of the resources (3D models, etc.) pre-loaded into the app. This not only saves on file size of the app, it also means that the app can pull real-time information and data that can be changed by many people at once. However, in order to do that I needed some kind of back-end database…

For those of you that know me, you will know that as well as doing my PhD I work on the development of the open-source archaeological database system known as the Archaeological Recording Kit (ARK). It seemed like a logical step to combine these two projects and use ARK as the back-end database. So that is what I went and did and at the same time created a rudimentary AR interface to ARK. The preliminary results can be seen in the video below:

This example uses the Qualcomm AR API, and ARK v1.0. Obviously at the moment it is marker-based AR (or at least image recognition based), the next task is to incorporate the iDevices’ gyroscope to enable the AR experience to continue even when the QR code is not visible.