Bringing Seakart to Life Everywhere
The Seakart is a new, unique, high performance recreational watercraft. The “ultimate sea toy,” it combines the fun of a jet ski with the comfort and passenger capacity of a yacht tender. We’ve been working with Seakart to show off this cool craft in some novel ways using new technologies such as augmented reality.
As with other luxury items, the Seakart can be configured in a dizzying number of combinations to match the customer’s preferences. When presenting at an event like a boat show, however, there isn’t room to display more than one or two craft on the show floor.
Instead, we built a prototype for Seakart to demonstrate how we could display a configurable craft within an augmented reality experience.
Using Apple’s ARKit, the app inserts a 3D model of the Seakart craft into a real-world scene as seen through a device’s camera. Users can view the model from any angle, and even walk around it to inspect the details. You can seat yourself right in the driver’s seat and get a feel for the controls!
In addition, the model can be configured in real time. Colors can be applied to any area of the craft supported by the manufacturer, and in the future we’d like to add features to change seat material texture or swap out optional equipment.
The AR experience proved highly engaging and was a hit with both the client and show attendees.
Along with that, Seakart wanted a way to display the same craft customizations on their booth’s big-screen TV. Using SceneKit, we were able to work the same configurable model into an Apple TV app. Here, the Seakart bobs realistically on shifting waves.
The craft can be rotated and zoomed with the Apple TV remote’s touchpad, and there’s an option to switch to a night scene in order to enjoy the craft’s customizable color LEDs.
This turned out to be a great attention-getter and many attendees tried their hand at customizing a unique Seakart.
And here’s the tvOS app in action:
Beyond the native apps, we’ve been developing a web-based configurator, powered by webGL, which Seakart can incorporate into its marketing site. It affords many of the same features as the tvOS app: full freedom of rotation and zoom, and realtime customization.
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