UBCO_Hackathon

Augmented Reality - Solar System - echoAR + Unity

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Inspiration

Vision: https://imgur.com/a/pqvAbOi My goal was to build a Augmented Reality planetary model of our solar system with (programmatically). For ex: animate orbit of all planets, orbit of Hubble and International Space Station around Earth. Interactive augmented reality where the user can select various aformentioned views. (echoAR + Unity manage the Augmented Reality, but is challenging due to scaling of planetary dimensions and time).

The goal was to write modularized code that would avoid hardcoding cartesian coordinates to allow for animations and different viewsets created via a user interface to send POST requests to echoAR API . Accomplished a somewaht working prototype, needs fine tuning and further development. I learnt a lot since I had not used any of the technologies going (aside from REST APIs) in and feel I can tackle the challenges better in version 2.0.

What it does

Augments 3d models of our solar system into reality

How I built it

echoAR (REST API interface for 3d model CDN) and Unity (for building relationships b/w models). I used C# in Unity to parse through objects, created custom classes to create dict with key:obj mapping to send POST Requests to the echoAR API. Why? To modularize testing of scaling factors, dimensions, and for future development of animating orbit. The POST requests work well for snapshots. Utilizing Unity's physics engine would be idea for building animations to not overload the REST API.

I had not used C#, Unity, echoAR prior to the project.

Challenges I ran into

  • The scaling is the most challenging aspect due to the vasntess of space, size of bodies, and limited space. I was able to get a working 3d example with scaling but not in AR. I did not have any time to rebuild and identify bugs as the android SDK was published end of the day. AR testing is difficult b/c testing is done in Unity which does not have access to AR. In unity, the model works as expected (kind of)

  • Planetary coordinates (orbits for time lapse, various eclipse, orbit of ISS and Hubble) . Too time consuming to collect, clean and serialize the data into JSON. Also, have not created data bases in Unity before.

  • Started with a group of 4. 2 people were absent. 1 person was exploring Unity but left due to work and I didn't get any of his learnings.

  • Sample 2D view of debugging for scaling: https://i.imgur.com/gdTN9WS.png

  • Publishing the app via Unity is a time consuming process. Spent 7 hours understanding the connection between software's and being able to navigate the scripts.

  • 4 hours of connection outage to echoAR (maintenance during late night) halted development.

  • Unfamiliar with C#, as I'm used to writing in python.

  • Understaffed

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