Developing The Almighty Anchorussy’s
24.04.2023 | Day 6 | Production Exercise 2
If I could get rich by every raindrop that landed on me today, I’d be a billionaire. ANYWAY, besides the point, the morning started off nice and wet ;) and I continued to explore unknown waters later throughout the day.
It was a happy reunion with Lea from Invisible Room again! We started the day dividing our taskforces into smaller functional groups. So per taskforce (there are 3) we need an Art Director, a Project Manager and a Developer. We got a couple minutes to figure this out, and for my taskforce, Blue Nipple, it was quite an easy division. Let me present you:
- Pal Pratima as Art Director
- Stefania Matache as Project Manager
- Me, Laurien Michiels as Developer
Pratima started with asset research, Stefania organized all tasks on our Trello board, conducted further research and experimented with AI imaging on Leiapix. I started the day creating a Glitch file for developing the 3D virtual environment that will become the inside of the vulva, and another 2 code files for the scannable anchors that will make the AR vulva portal appear (1 for 2D AR objects (the safe option) and 1 for 3D AR objects (the ideal option)).
I want to first explain what Glitch is before I go on explaining what I did today. Glitch is a tool that allows you to develop/code digital creative online projects. It is super practical as it has a “make it prettier” option which (re)organizes the code for you, but also offers an easy and seamless workspace for amateur and beginning coders.
In Glitch, I learnt how to install equirectangular backgrounds, which creates this type “sphere” or “cube” environment that is actually one whole image. It looks pretty cool as it feels highly immersive. This environment I have to “fill in” tomorrow with other media.
Then I went on experimenting with another code file. This one is for the anchoring of the AR objects. Our prototype/project is meant to be placed throughout the city and that means there is a need for “markers” that signal an interaction point. Our markers for now will be stencil graffiti’s of vulvas. Once you hold up your phone to these markers it will recognize a pattern in it which triggers the appearance of an 2D or 3D object in AR. I converted plain images to targets using MindAR and then linking these files in the code. For the AR image, I started out with a plain 2D image but later on decided to explore 3D objects as well. These objects need to be in .gltf format (which you can easily do in blender for example). It was not that easy however, I started with the creation of a vulva in blender, but made the mistake of adding too many vertices in it which made it unnecessarily complex. Then I found a presculpted vulva model and imported that in blender, but the file was so incredibly big that Glitch kind of glitched haha. I now know you can reduce the vertices using the decimate modifier which did decrease the file size quite significantly. Anyway, I tested the 3D object and it did work on the anchors, but it looked quite glitchy still, it was also tilted in an impractical way and no textures. This will be another task for tomorrow, trying to figure out how to add manageable 3D objects. Should it absolutely not work, then we can always go back to the 2D plane image.
My head is full, my heart is excited. ❤
