PortalAR - virtual traveling

Placed Portal
GIF

Inspiration

We want to enable people currently stuck at home due to traveling bans and curfews to still see and explore what our planet has to offer. We use augmented reality (AR) and Instagram filters to make virtual travel and immersive experiences as approachable and as easily available as possible, right inside your own living room.

What it does

The user places a portal via Instagram inside of their room. Entering this portal, the user now can view various vistas around the world. In this example, one of the highest viewpoints on Madeira Island. Through the power of AR technology, the user can look around and is totally immersed inside of the scene. This is possible without the use of special apps or hardware like VR-glasses. Because we implemented the technology into an Instagram filter, the only thing needed is an Instagram account.

How we built it

We used a 360° camera to capture the image on the viewpoint. We then build a 3D scene in blender and imported it in SparkAR where we used occluder meshes normally used for the hat and glasses filter to realize the portal effect.

Our portal technology is currently only available as an Instagram filter, but we can easily build it into already existing apps or into a new one.

Challenges we ran into

The limitations of file and image size inside of SparkAR meant we had to be very resourceful and use a lot of tricks to make this effect work inside of Instagram.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We found a way to work around the limitations of SparkAR and can offer the same image quality as the original image of the camera even though the size is limited to 1024x1024 px. Also we are proud that we can make this effect approachable to a lot of people due to Instagram's huge user base and make the isolation phase currently a little more bearable and interesting.

What we learned

We learned how we can work around limitations by working smart and by being resourceful.

What's next for PortalAR - virtual traveling

We learned to appreciate out freedoms and what it means to have them stripped away. So we want to give people that maybe don't have those freedoms the opportunity to still visit the most beautiful places of our planet. Maybe as a means of battling overtourism or just to show them that we have to protect and conserve those places. For that we want to implement lots of different locations and vistas all over the world and maybe make them even more immersive through ambient sounds.