Circuit Builder AR

Screenshot of how a circuit looks in AR

Inspiration

When I was in high school, and even the first few years of college, I found it extremely hard to learn about electronics outside of classes. I thought, "I can make something with my skills to improve this."

What it does

If you have all of the needed parts, simply point your phone camera at them, and watch AR fill in the wiring so that you no longer have to dig for datasheets, or get confused with wiring diagrams.

How I built it

Using Vuforia, which allows for object tracking and other AR functionalities. Unity, which allows for the 3D world space editing which was used to make the live AR wire diagrams.

Challenges I ran into

Unity is extremely daunting to get started with. Just the beginner tutorials are 8 hours long each, so it was a lot of trial and error to get the program to work.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm really happy with how the app turned out, it looks really good for a demo made in under 24 hours.

What I learned

I learned a bit more about how to use Unity and the 3d space kind of programming.

What's next for Circuit Builder AR

The demo program was only made for one simple circuit because of time constraints. However, it would be cool to build out a full app for all of the Electronics classes at UC.

In addition, Unity allows for me to port this application to IOS, Linux, Windows, and more. However, this will require a much greater effort to carry out.

How is this different from other apps?

If you look at Google AR Core, Apple ARKit, and other major AR apps, the major thing that they do well is object recognition and ground plane tracking. Meaning, you can point your camera at almost any object and either know what you're looking at, or project something onto that object. Those kinds of capabilities have been publically available since around 2011. What is really innovative, unique, and new, is AR with an experience in mind. For example, manuals, instructions, and hands on activities that are completely custom are able to provide an experience that Google or Apple is not going to be able to reproduce in the standard AR Core or ARKit apps because it is a custom program catered to a specific need. This type of program is what I have created a demo for with this project.

Where can I see the project?

Unfortunately, Vuforia requires some private keys in order to make the app work. I cannot share the project source at the moment because I do not want my keys to be abused.

But if you want to try out the technology, start here: https://library.vuforia.com/articles/Training/getting-started-with-vuforia-in-unity.html