Tennis Minton

Inspiration

This summer I learned how to play badminton with my host family. For me, this game with my host family became less about the competition and more about learning something together and bonding with my new family. It has become a sport about laughing, learning how to play better, enjoying something that I have no clue about doing, uplifting one another when we make a very good shot, and getting to know each other. I knew for this project I wanted to create something that could at least be that to anyone who uses my lens; interactive gameplay to collaborate with friends while having fun figuring things out and enjoying each other's company.

What it does

When you access the tennis Minton portal after you sign in, you can walk around and interact with the objects in that environment. At the entrance, press the button! This will launch the rocket ship releasing a lot of tennis balls of different sizes to the ground. You can move towards it and move the ball around. This also works with the balls from the canon and the balls bouncing around.

The amazing thing about this is, that you can invite your friends to join you in the same space. Your friends and family can join in remotely or in-person(in the same setting)

How I built it

It was built with 3 different templated from the Lens Studio; Portal, Physics, and ARBlockDrawing.- as its base.

With the help of the Physics template, I got a better understanding of how Physics works in Lens Studio. I assigned a Physics Body to all the balls with "spherical fit" in the inspector section for the balls. To add textures to the balls, I used Blender to convert the different tennis ball image textures to .ismat files. I did this by creating a plane body in a blender and then adding textures to that plane body so that when imported into fbx files, I could have access to the textures in the right file format. I also adapted two physics examples from the Physic Template, one with "Start Velocity" and "Physics Body Types" to suit the environment that I was building in and what I wanted, and incorporated that into my Lens.

With Portal, the tennis Minton experience to feel like one was embarking on an adventure to our own unique Wimbledon experience. Using Blender to develop the 3D model of the tennis court (learned it from watching Youtube), I exported the file as FBX and imported it into my lens. My 3D model replaced the CITY[REPLACE ME] model. I also adapted this template to suit what I wanted. Remodeled elements of the portal to complement its new environment.

Since I wanted a collaborative experience, I use the connected lens experience from the ARBlock Drawing Template to create my own connected lens. I created the UI and with help from Adobe Illustrator, I created my own logo which I uploaded into the Lens.

With each template, I imported the desired results as OBJ and merged them into one Lens.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, I wanted to use a hand tracking template so that it can grab the ball by hand and throw it. Unfortunately, when you enter the portal, I had no idea how one could also see their hands to make that happen.

Merging Template Problems: I had trouble merging the different OBJ from the different templates to work cohesively. If not done right and in a certain order, I lose a lot of functionalities. That was a challenge.

Stable Portal: It was really hard figuring out a way to make the portal stable. I came close to it but there is more to be done to achieve this.

Physics: Figuring out how to grab an item and throw them using projectile motion.

Touch: Figuring out a way to specify different "touches" for a different purpose (Touch Collision for Button or Touch collision for Ball or Touch to move the Portal ) was hard to figure out. I came close to it

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting this done to a point where it could be used! That was amazing and glad that I made it happen. Going from not understanding what was happening in this lens studio to better using its jargon and having an idea of what some functionality or scripts did was amazing.

What we learned

Testing your lens using "Preview From Snapchat" several times after making the slightest update is important. This was an important lesson.

Learned how to better navigate Lens Studio

Never in my wildest dreams could I imagine I could build anything related to AR, but this competition made it possible and I really excited to explore what is next. I learned through this experience to never say never to trying new-uncomfortable-notSoSure things and experiences.

What's next for Tennis Minton

Since this is a collaborative gameplay, I will love to hear from people who use this lens suggestions on how to make it better. I would also love to collaborate with more people to make this Lens better and more fun than it is.

Built With

• blender
• javascript
• lensstudio