Immersive Media Design

AR Book Map Proposal

IMD Final Project

After half a semester of experimenting and researching augmented reality techniques and opportunities, I’m ready to dive into my own project.

I’ve decided to create an AR app based on my fall semester final project, the Book Map website (see documentation below). I’ll be working on this project individually.

Mapping World Literature with Mapbox

functionality of the book map

Purpose

I created my original Book Map site as a way for readers to expand their horizons and build empathy through literature from all over the world. Building the book map in an augmented reality format will make it more fun and interactive, and will allow the map feature to be a realistic globe, versus a flat map.

I am excited to build on my Unity, C#, and XCode skills. I am also excited to push my book map project to the next level by exploring my data set through a new lens.

Inspiration & Vision

The inspiration for the format of this app is the BBC Civilizations AR app. After opening the app and scanning your surface, a realistic looking globe appears. The globe can be moved, rotated, and scaled. Additionally, there are featured info hotspots that are marked with a yellow dot. Clicking on each hotspot brings up the relevant 3D scanned artifact.

the BBC Civilizations AR app in action in my room

In terms of the data each hot spot would bring up, my app would obviously differ from the Civilizations app. In my original book map, clicking the hot spots brought up a popup that included an image of the book’s cover, the title, the author, and the country. In the AR version, I am considering a 3D book popping up when you click on a hotspot. Maybe I design one 3D book and then change out the covers for each popup. The popup could also be a 2D poster-ish version of the book’s cover, and/or 2D text floating in space. I will have to experiment.

Here’s another inspiration photo of augmented reality information appearing on a map:

Photo by Tobias on Unsplash

3D Object Inspiration from Sketchfab

Source: Sketchfab

Source: Sketchfab

Next Steps

1. Design and build the globe and other elements (books, text) in Unity. This will include some experimentation of 2D vs 3D assets.
2. Design and build the interactions (scanning the room, objects appearing and moving, etc.)
3. Connect my dataset to Unity using the API, either in JSON format through C# or by using another library.

Skills

I will be building this project with Unity and C#, and I will also be using AR Foundation. After all of our work so far this semester, I have some familiarity with Unity and a little bit with C#, but I have not yet tried to build anything with AR Foundation.

I will also need to link the Mapbox API into Unity. I imagine that I will need a lot of assistance with this! Thanks in advance, RJ.

This will be fun!