Interactive Spaces Final Project

Animated GIF

Concept

Deforestation is the permanent destruction of forests in order to make the land available for other uses. Forests are not just a collection of trees and other plants but they are integrated ecosystems and home to some of the most diverse life on Earth. When forests are lost, their destruction sets off a series of change that affect life around the world. In my project, I would like to use AR to bring the audience into the wild and realised the problem of deforestation.

Working with unity

This is the first time I’m using unity and the online tutorial actually helps me a lot. In unity itself, there’s a vuforia plugin that enable us to create an AR app. This tutorial is really useful for my project as I need to detect the tree and project something on it.

Before trying on my matchsticks tree, I input a random object for unity to detect and display sparkles on it. Initially, I tried using my laptop camera and it works. When exporting into my mobile phone, some problems occurs as my Xcode doesn’t work. Xcode is an application to transfer unity program into iphone iOS specifically. I realised I build it in a wrong player setting, in order for it to run in iOS, we have to build it in the iOS player setting.

Xcode

After trying out on different object to ensure that the whole thing will work, I slowly work with my own tree. However, I realised that the image that I placed into unity to allow it to detect the original object is important as it affects if the camera is able to detect. Due to the change in lighting, unity does not recognise my image target and thus not able to display the animation.

Initially, I wanted to add in more interactive elements like getting the audience to play with the background other than the tree. The audience will be able to navigate through a forest and different hidden buttons will actually activate the hidden scene. However, I tried inputting buttons and C# script into unity but it doesn’t detect the area that I want to navigate. I manage to get the camera to detect the whole area and display some black and white images (as seen in video 0.09). Thus I decided to work on other element for submission.

Final Process

I moved on to add leaves where audience is able to view different video about deforestation from it. Each leaf is built with matchsticks as well and they are unique in shape so that unity is able to detect each individual leaf and display different video accordingly. Also, the camera is able to detect more than one object to display the respective video.

Final Outcome

Further Enhancement

I would like to find out more on what AR is capable of doing and also improve on my current project where the detection could be better. Currently, it’s not sensitive enough to detect the object immediately and sometimes the detection will not work due to change in lighting or any other external factors. Thus, working on the image target sensitivity will be important in enhancing the user experience. Also, I feel that there could be more interactivity to it like being able to interact with the interface and surrounding.

Inspirations

World Skin, 1997
By Maurice Benayoun


Interactive Spaces Mid Sem Project (Analog)