82A Light Blue

sol

Inspiration

As sky lovers our inspiration was to find a way to immerse ourselves into the universe and be able to interact and visualize the planets spinning and, even, how the eclipses happen in a safe way! It is an awesome AR way to have this huge universe on the palm of our hand, and we worked with that goal in mind.

What it does

It literally does immerse the user in universe! The user can pinch and place the universe wherever he wants to and analyze the planets while spinning the mobile around the environment and check how the system works. And why not: sing and dance in this beautiful and awesome place known as space? Since the plane tracker and the segmentation allows the user to space travel it is a perfect way to play yourself near to planes and make stunning reels while dancing and admiring the galaxy. Also, due to the volumetric light placed at the Sun and at the Earth it is possible to easily observe how the eclipses work, therefore this filter may also be use in educational purposes!

How I built it

First of all we wanted a way to interact with the planets and star. One of the team members is a Scientist and wished that the students could see how the universe spins. Therefore, we figure out a way to put the star texture around the user and added the planets in the environment. Then, we made adjusted the scalar size and made it spin around. Finally, we wonder how to make the sun looks bright, and we started using a shader patch. Unfortunately, probably due to so many render passes, it didn't work and showed a black screen in devices. To overcome that, we started using volumetric light and added it to the sun and to the Earth.

Challenges I ran into

We faced two main challenges that were to fit the base environment that holds the planets with the cube instead of a sphere, due to the texture arrangement and to make it the higher resolution possible in Spark AR. Also, we had some issues to return the plane tracker coordinates, and to solve it we used the billboard system of particles.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are really proud of how the volumetric lights are so smooth, also of how we overcome challenges such as the cube as an immersive box and how we used multiple render passes in this filter that allowed to become so light even tough with so high resolution textures.

What I learned

This filter helped us to learn more about the possibilities of the volumetric lights and glowing, and how to use different type materials in our favor. The possibility of making the Sun and the Earth flat and the other materials responsible to light, allowed a better eclipse experience! Besides that, the spark AR library helped a lot and made the process pretty faster by having already a done solar system, ready to use!

What's next for 82A Light Blue

As perspective we aim to make the planets rotation audio reactive to the user and perhaps improve the self screen and when it/if it become possible, use the plane tracker in self cam so it will be easier to user record it.