PROJEKTOR | Devpost

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Projection of the photograph onto the surface of the 3d tile (dropped feature)
The NSDAP office just round the corner of the former jewish department store Gutmann
Designing in ShapesXR
Working in the demo app

Inspiration

Last year I was working on a mobile AR project to tell the stories of the people engraved in the Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones) in the pavement of European cities. I found out that it's a crazy amount of work to create and tell a story in 3D (surprise), while the local libraries are full of books with old photographs about the history of your city, neighborhood or village.

That's where PROJEKTOR comes in. It uses Google's photorealistic 3D tiles to place the photos in exactly the same place and perspective where they were originally taken decades ago. It helps you create an augmented guided tour of your neighborhood or favorite place and test your tour in MR.

https://devpost.com/software/stolpersteine-stumbeling-stones

What it does

PROJEKTOR lets you select the location where you working on and then place the prepared photographs in the 3D scene. The camera with frustum helps you to find the right perspective. The camera shows you the place where you have to go to view and listen the AR experience. You can scale the whole scene to take the place of user of the AR experience and test the experience.

How I built it and challenges I encountered

I used Blender and Blossom (Blender OSM) to import and optimize the 3D tiles. I could use the Unity plugin, but my original idea was to project the photos directly onto the surface of the 3D tiles. So I needed more insight into their structure and the ability to modify the materials. I also did a test in Blender and it looked ugly and I decided to drop that feature.

The interaction design was done with the awesome ShapesXR app, which really helped me get out of my developer brain and into a designer's perspective. Thanks Gabriele! https://youtube.com/shorts/RQ_BC5XrPkI

The camera model was done with Blender and the location screenshots with Google Earth. I also had trouble installing the updated version of the Android SDK because of the wifi and lost hours.

Achievements I am proud of

Finally, the biggest accomplishment when working alone is creating a demo-ready project. I am kind of proud that I finished the world scaling with the controllers in the last hours.