Initial Idea: Augmented Reality Vase
I have previously worked with a ceramics artist called Yuling when I visited her workshop in Tangshan, China back in 2019 and she is a fantastic sculptur and artist whos works I still have displayed. She was also very interested in ways that she could modernise her exhibitions using digital technology and I always thought it would be great to use AR as a way to not necessarily enhance her work but to accompany as an additional piece.
I felt that this would be a great idea to revisit and see if i could create an AR experience that could work with ceramic works. The idea for this piece would be using a vase or an image target on the vase which would then unlock an additional digital art piece that would be layered on top. So you could have a plain vase on display but when you scan it with your phone, you can see some animations of flowers or the imagery that is alread on display with the piece.
Adding Interactivity?
Of course AR experience can be triggered simple by observing an object with your movile device an the experience will begin but what if this could be enhanced further so that the user can actually ‘discover’ or ‘choose’ which animations on the vase would trigger first and when.
Downloading Vuforia
After coming up with some initial ideas for my Augmented Reality experience i needed to work out the basics of using Vuforia. So using the guide that was given to me i installed and imported the package to Unity which I had some problems at the start with different versions of the software not working but I eventually got this all working. As you can see from the images below I used some basic tests by using an image from my work notebook as a ‘image target’ and then used a simple model I have from turbosquid of a wallet as the augmented object.
From the images below after a few calibrations and some settings to change i was eventually able to get the AR experience working through my webcam so that when i held up my notepad to the camera the wallet model would appear on top. I am happy that this is now all working which means that i can progress with the next steps of trying to create my own AR animations/models to work for this experience.