Cookie Wonderland

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  Cookie factory

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  LELE The Magical Dinosaurs

Inspiration

The inspiration behind Cookie Wonderland is to create a world around the user’s feet. When we received the prompt for this year's Spark AR Online Hackathon, we thought to ourselves, most Augmented Reality Camera Effects focus on the space in front or above, but not quite as often does it focus on the earth we walk on. Therefore we came up with the clever idea of creating an AR World Filter mostly focused on the ground, by designing a fantasyland when users pointed their cameras down, to sweetly bring us “down to earth”, and remind us the joys of being grounded.

What it does

Provides users with an escape from the hustle & bustle of their everyday life by bringing a new energetic, sweet, & lovely world to their reality. Tapping the screen, user’s will enter Cookie Wonderland and get the opportunity to submerge into the sugar-high life of LeLe Dinosaur.

How I built it

First, we added Face Trackers to aid users in navigating their experience within Cookie Wonderland. For example, if the user is using the Selfie Camera, they’ll be directed to switch to the Rear-Camera, where the magic is awaiting.

Next, once the user is using the Rear Camera, we created a plane tracker that detects the floor and signifies where users should stand. After finding the right spot, users can Tap Screen to trigger our animation made up of various 2D and 3D elements that make up Cookie Wonderland. The animation will continue to loop thanks to the way we set up our Patches within the Patch Editor. Users can look around and realize that their real world has been augmented into an AR World. We did this by using different angles of planes and mixing in both 2D and 3D elements. We also created this story-like idea of LeLe the dinosaur loving cookies, by using a Particle Emitter to provide the magical dinosaurs with lots of cookies to enjoy!

Challenges I ran into

The first challenge was turning LeLe, a 2D Character into a 3D Character that can be animated. After that, we faced the challenge of using Spark AR’s patch system to control our animations. Lastly, the biggest challenge came in creating an User Friendly Experience with the User Interface limitations of Instagram. For example, not allowing static text proved to be a challenge considering we wanted a way to teach users how to use our filter. We found that the available instructions just didn’t cut it. Hence why we added the rules to a Face Tracker, however there’s the issue of, if a user is already opened to the Rear-Camera and has no faces to be detected, then users may not know how to use this filter.

Lastly, to us, finishing the project was a huge challenge. We are simultaneously working on various other Spark AR Camera Effect projects for various clients, and so it has been a huge challenge in itself just to balance our time and work together as a team to get things done.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We feel our biggest accomplishments lie in bringing together our artistic abilities with our know-how in using the Spark AR Patch Editor, coming up with a fresh interactive concept, and finishing this project within the timeline. We’re really into our concept, but time simply was not on our side, especially with the many changes caused by the real world but we also felt that now was a better time than ever to create a beautiful joyful AR World and thus we overcame all the challenges we previously mentioned and accomplished Cookie Wonderland.

What I learned

We learned a lot about how 2D Illustrations don’t always translate the way we imagine into 3D Content. Luckily, we had many professional 3D Designers to help give us some guidance on this matter.

Additionally, we learned the importance of project management! As previously mentioned, we were quite short on time and had other projects on hand, but after planning out the creative flow, we had better control of the execution process, and learned a lot about time management!

Lastly, through this project, we learned better concept planning skills. We found that our idea did not have structure at first, which led to many headaches along the way. At the end of this project, we were able to learn to think ahead and avoid running into avoidable problems! This lesson also allowed us to improve on how we worked together as a team.

What's next for cookie wonderland

Cookie Wonderland is just one part of LeLe the Dinosaur’s magical world. To us, Cookie Wonderland is just the tip of the iceberg. Everything from the amazing Cookie Factory (in the sky), to the story of the birth of the dinos, are all things we’d like to develop more and design even more diverse characters. Additionally, there are so many environmental developments that we can still create, for example in addition to our grassland under the starry night sky, we could create a forest, a beach, a magical kingdom, the ideas we have are endless! We’re even thinking of creating interactive games and even more in depth immersive experiences! We cannot wait to create more magical AR Worlds, and are so thankful for Spark AR Hackathon’s prompt this year, for it has given us such newfound inspirations.

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