Magic Windows | MidTerm: Alice in AR Wonderland V.2
Recap
Ridwan and I redid our Alice in Wonderland project. In this iteration, we wanted to embrace the physical aspect of AR, the experience it could afford, and bake it into the story better.
Here’s what we planned for and what we ended up with:
Scene 1: Getting Smaller / Bigger
For this scene, we attached an image target on the bottom of two cups. Like Alice in the story, user does not know which of the “potion” would make them smaller.
The idea was that the user has to actually drink the liquid in the cup to know which “potion” makes the user smaller.
Once they finish drinking the liquid, the image target will be visible and they can scan them to become smaller/bigger.
Here’s what we ended up with:
The script saves how much the scene has scaled down/up. Technically, we could apply the scale to the other scenes but we did not implement this.
Scene 2: Finding Cheshire Cat
Cheshire Cat in the story is this mischievous and elusive cat. It camouflages itself and hides well. Translating it into an AR experience, we printed a large image that has smaller image targets in it. The user has to scan the entire scene to find Chesire Cat.
Here’s the actual implementation:
Scene 3: Alice being chased by a Troop of Cards
This was the hardest scene to setup/create.
We wanted the head and limbs of the soldiers to protrude from the image target itself, and user should be able to physically blow the card soldiers away to save Alice.
To trigger the animation change from running to being blown away, there are 2 ways:
Detect blowing by sensing the volume of microphone input
Detect how far image target has moved away from the AR camera. If the difference in position is big enough, assume user has blown the cards.
We encountered several issues with this scene:
We could not setup the model target. The outline does not show up in the scene, and hence we don’t have Alice rendered.
Having the limbs attached to the image target does not render as well as we wanted, so we ended up making compromises.
We were working on both a Mac and Windows, with different Unity versions. Combining the scenes was realllyyyy hard.
Reflection
The scenes and experience were not as polished as I would like, but to me these were still interesting exercises in designing interaction in AR. That said, the experience would be a closer approximate if we have time to export these into a phone.
It would be interesting to use the saved scale from the potion scene in the other scenes. For example, if a user never get smaller, they would not be able to interact with the other characters, or the characters would just be rendered a lot smaller.
