Aesthetic Reality Projector

Inside of flower projection
Beautiful projection artwork
Projection for the light effect
Light deformed on curved surfaces

Inspiration

Indie music video using projector
In the youtube we can see the a lot of music video. Usually famous artists having a lot of money make high quality music videos with various special effects. However many indie artists use projectors for the music video to save money. But we love that raw and vintage vibes. But because of the pandemic it became more difficult to make it. So we decide to make an effect help making their own special video with projector style.

What it does

It helps you make projector style videos using their image/video in gallery. So with this effect, depending on video you have, you can create variety of projection video style. Some people can make their own creative projection mapping music video in their room and some people create beautiful projection artwork like standing in front of a projector.

How I built it

Focused on looking like a real projector effect

Scaled the vertex coordinates depending on image resolution ratio loaded from the gallery for cropping to screen.
Translated the vertex coordinates depending on the strength of red and green color for deforming a light on curved surfaces.
Made blur effect and adjusted color levels, saturation and lightness using render pass to create a light reflection and blurry rough texture of the projection.
Made a glitch effect for slight vibration of the projector video.
To make a realistic shadow, we translated vertex coordinate depending on the face position.

Challenges I ran into

We thought the most important thing was to make it look real. In our experience, We thought the video load from gallery affected more no matter how this effect was well made. So we've done a lot of experiments loading various kind of video from gallery and updated every time to make it look real no matter what video was loaded. And now we thought we made it.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Usually, in Spark AR, we often miss the task of enhancing the quality for making perfection because actually it is for fun like hobby for me. But this time, we made a lot of effort to improve the perfection so when we completed it, we couldn't never forget this accomplishments.

What I learned

Develop the shader using render pass.
How to collaborate with creators.

What's next for Aesthetic Reality Projector

To make it user friendly, we chose the 2D effect using 2D coordinate. But after the hackerthon we have a plan to make it world AR effect version using plane tracker.