Maps & Dioramas AR

Category page showing 3D models for London, Paris, Football Stadiums using 3D Tiles
Wembley stadium another POV
Eiffel Tower seen in the living room
Wembley stadium seen in the living room
Tower of London seen in the living room

Inspiration

As a tech tinkerer with a love for learning, traveling to historical places, and looking at maps, I couldn't help but build this one to discover the power of augmented reality in learning.

As a father of a 6-year-old, my ability to travel has greatly reduced but my curiosity has only increased. I believe AR is a great way to look at things with more depth and detail than a video.

What it does

Maps & Dioramas AR(MAD) is an innovative augmented reality (AR) app for iOS. With MAD, users can bring detailed 3D maps and dioramas into their homes, providing an immersive and educational experience like never before.

How we built it

MAD was initially planned for Apple Vision Pro and I started my MVP in the new Vision OS Simulator. I later realized that it would be futile to wait for hardware that is yet to come into the market and build for one already in people's hands. I pivoted to making it for iOS.

Since Apple's AR tech is very advanced and I had previous experience building in that ecosystem, I chose to code in SwiftUI. Once, the platform was built the content became very important and that's where the challenge was.

Challenges we ran into

As a programmer, 3D content is something that I have done but not great at. This is where Google's Map Tiles API came in very handy. I was able to fast-track the workflow to get famous landmarks into my app by using the API. A lot of work was done on the Blender plugin.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm super happy that I was able to go from an idea to a published app in less than 6 weeks.

What we learned

3D content production is becoming faster and more democratized as such APIs are becoming available. With these pipelines being added our content production can scale faster.