Learning How to Augment my Reality

For the past few months, I have been looking to further my programming knowledge by dabbling in the AR world. Years ago I remember finding it pretty neat to be able to place AR versions of furniture in my living space, to see if it will work in the location I was planning to place it. Later I found it fun to play games on my phone that allowed the characters to interact with my real-world environment.

So I enrolled to complete a specialization in Augmented and Virtual Reality. Like anything else you learn, you have to understand the how-to crawl before you walk. So there was foundation learning and manuals to read on for programs like Unity and languages like C#. After having a loose understanding of frameworks, languages, and functions. I was ready to create my first few projects.

One of the projects was with image recognition. I was introduced to Vuforia engine. With using the AR camera abilites in Unity, I was able to provide almost any image I wanted the ability to be rocognized like a QR code. It was a fun project, you can take a look at it in my github. I was able to use a simple bitmoji art as my QR code to activate an AR version of a business card. Once the image activated with a simple smart phone camera, you were able to see images represented by social media icons pop up in real world via your device screen. These icons were click able and lead you to different media to reach me and see my work.

One of the only issues I ran into when it came to working with Vuforia as an extention with Unity was that I could not just go around and share the image in hope that it will come to life with everyone that had it. The perpective clients or those in my network were required to download an app in order to see my image come to life for them.

With time, I was later assigned an ability to host a website that would activate AR capabilies if the site was opended with a smartphone. I was able to use GitHubs Pages to host, https://hlozano12.github.io/BusinessCard/, which activated an agumented reality version of my previous business card. All links would float in real time in your view via your smartphone camera. Each link would lead you to my social medias.

This capabilty was used with using A-frame.io. This allowed me to make 3D worlds with HTML and Entity-Component. I later learned I was able to do this for Quest, Rift, WMR, SteamVR, mobile, desktop. And to best see a visual of what I was creating I used https://glitch.com/. This was a very helpful tool that was shared to me by a peer. I found myself tired of having to constantly push my GitHub repo in order to test changes. With this site, I was able to see change in real time. Once I was happy with what I had I would copy my code into my terminal and commit my work to GitHub. If you ever find yourself interested in working with webAR or using AR in other forms, I would pay https://aframe.io/ a visit. I found it very easy to follow and set up. I will for sure be spending more time with this resource.

I was happy with how my first try at webAR went, and I hope you have fun with it.