MagicKit

Inspiration

Wouldn't real life be awesome if we could record our everyday moments in the way of wizardry? We can then share with the rest of the world what we've always wanted to see: Magic in real life!

Saturday felt like a muggles day... and then:

I was inspired by the contest prompt: "For this category, make an audience member feel like part of a film or game by creating an immersive storytelling experience through the use of virtual reality, augmented reality or other gaming technologies."

What if we could share the moments of our lives, visually imbued with the type of high magick we'll see in Harry Potter or The Illusionist or The Magicians... or any of a number of other real magic sagas.

What it does

It lets you apply what folks in the industry might call 3D special effect filters to people and real world objects by using realtime augmented reality. As director, it's your choice which magical effect you want to assign to different objects. Ands then you have a live action realtime special effects magic camera!

How I built it

For the purposes of prototyping via RealityScript on Unity, we use Vuforia GroundPlane for iOS and Android support - it automatically defaults to using either ARKit or ARCore depending on platform. OpenCV is used to track people.

I also used my own faced.io faceshop.io AR creator tool to prototype the special FX. In an upcoming version of the app, anyone can design their own magical effects for inclusion of their own high magick spells in this app!

Challenges I ran into

I wanted to design as much as possible from scratch, aided by my rapid prototyping tools. The special effects are a first draft, but can definitely be fine tuned - more can also be added.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

MAGICK... at least via my breadandbutter via augmented reality.

What I learned

I wanted to try realtime greenscreening to automatically background remove a character so that the effect looks like it's around them. OpenCV has this for free, though it's a bit noisy, it actually does not look bad for some particle effects. I ended up using my old occlusion cylinder trick, but added in a sizer to make it more versatile. Indie Magic Directors block out their live action scenes anyway, right?