utc farnborough international airshow ar app
firstborn
June-July 2018
Click the image to see a video of the project, AR Footage from 0:07 to 0:17
We made an AR app for UTC’s FIA exhibit to highlight and provide details regarding different parts and services offered by UTC.
My Role
I was the lead programmer, working with one other programmer to develop the application. This application was similar to the Chevron application that we had completed previously, however we switched from Vuforia to ARKit in hopes of getting better tracking stability. This application also featured fully animated UI.
Technology
Unity Engine
ARKit
Challenges
This project was pretty tight because we tried to do several new things at once in a short timespan. The original design was to use object recognition to overlay the 3d content directly onto the plane models. However there really wasn’t any R&D time and we were not able to get a 3d printed plane to test on so we had to quickly go back to the image recognition method that we had already done twice prior. We switched to ARKit hoping that the tracking stability would be better than Vuforia given that we would not be able to have users focus on a surface. And finally we tried to implement animated UI elements using video assets. This proved to be very finicky as some of the video assets would play perfectly and others would get stuck on certain frames, or not play at all, or skip frames. We were not ultimately able to figure out what the playback issues were so we had to cut the animation on the problematic interface assets.