On Augmenting My Reality

Laura Bloch
Nov 3 · 3 min read

This week, I focused on adding Augmented Reality to my Passion Project. It was a lot more complicated than I thought it would be!

It was really important to me to give users an experience that they could access from their phone’s camera without having to download a separate app.

I explored using Apple’s Reality Composer, because although Apple doesn’t yet support AR within the native iOS camera app, I would not be surprised if they are planning to add this feature soon. After experimenting with Reality Composer a bit, I encountered a couple of roadblocks — most important of which being that I don’t have my own iOS device! I was also unable to get my friend’s iPhone to recognize my target, and after a few frustrating attempts I re-evaluated my options.

Image file that I tried to use as a target

Seeing how I’d used Vuforia with Unity for a previous AR project, I decided to start there instead. I used a picture of my pin for my AR target. I thought that the app would be able to recognize the physical object in the real world and identify it using the picture.

After a few futile attempts using the image file as the target, I discovered that I needed my target to be an object rather than an image. This required downloading Vuforia’s 3D scanner utility, Object Scanner, onto my Android phone, and then importing the scanned .od file into my Vuforia target database.

Scanning the pin with Vuforia’s Object Scanner
Testing the object target within the Object Scanner app

After scanning, I was all set! I tested the target recognition within the Object Scanner app and saw that it was able to recognize it and project a green box onto it. So, I exported the object file from my phone to my Vuforia target database, went to Unity and added my new 3D object target.

Screenshot of generated “Button” upon recognizing the pin

I wrote a simple program to just show a button upon recognizing my pin. I tested it…and tested it…and I couldn’t get the program to recognize my pin! After a lot of Googling, I discovered that sometimes objects won’t get picked up by the desktop application, but will still get picked up by your phone. So I exported the program to my phone, loaded it, and suddenly it worked!

While it’s currently quite uninteresting, my intent is to change the appearance of the button and have it say “Rome.” Next, I will program it so that users can click the button to be directed to my blog post from when I visited Rome. Lastly, I may decide to add a photo gallery floating around the pin that users can scroll through.

Laura Bloch

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Rethinking and reforming education through technology

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