CtOS Phone

Demo Picture

Inspiration

I am a huge fan of Watch Dogs which came out back in 2014. I always had this idea at the back of my mind, "What if you were able to get your hands on a Hacker's phone and be able to Profile People while walking across the Streets" and this is what I wanted to achieve with this Effect.

What it does

This effect gives you access to a CtOS Phone which is what the protagonist uses in Watch Dogs which enables him to hack into pretty much anything in his environment and profile People and extract confidential information about them. Let’s say you are walking across the street and people are walking towards you so when you activate this Effect, it blurs their face and displays a custom information board similar to Watch Dogs along with giving you that cool Hacker Phone feel.

How I built it

I created a Colour grading LUT in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom which applies a bluish tint to the environment to give it the shady feel. Then I replicated the Watch Dogs information board animation in Adobe After Effects. I created multiple information boards for each Face Tracker so that the users don’t get bored (I’ve included 2). I created a Boot Animation so when the user activates the Effect, he actually feels the phone is booting into a Hacking Ecosystem. I have added immersive audio to back the effect.

Challenges I ran into

One of the biggest challenges was to actually replicate the Watch Dogs information board animation. It would have been a really tedious task if I would have gone for scripting and still maybe would have struggled to finish it. Instead, as I am comfortable with Video Editing, I chose After Effects and built it finally after 15 different layers and 6 hours of rendering time while keeping in mind that it is going to be pretty heavy in terms of size. Another challenge was to use the patch editor because this was the first time I have ever touched Spark AR but being an Electronics student, the logic was quite easy to pick up and I absolutely loved the experience.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This was my first ever Instagram Filter and I am happy that I was introduced to Spark AR. I had a lot of fun playing around with the patch editors, materials, textures etc. I am really happy that I was able to use my Video Editing and Illustrator skills and integrate that with the effect to make it even cooler.

What I learned

This was my first step into the World of AR, as I am more of a Web and App Development Programmer with absolutely no AR knowledge. This Hackathon taught me what are the factors which play an important role in AR, how do various objects work, choosing between 3D and 2D models in various situations, how to integrate my own works into AR etc. Overall it was a really fun experience and I am definitely looking forward to participate in the upcoming AR Hackathons.

What's next for CtOS Phone

One of the features I have been thinking about is building an interactive bridge in between people who have the Effect activated on their phones. They can challenge each other within a particular radius and play mini Cyberpunk themed games against each other in the AR world.