A downloadable tool for Android

Introduction / Overview

Interactively explore the World's Greatest Wonders in 3D from the comfort of your own home. Expose the internal chambers of the Great Pyramids of Egypt or direct the sunlight over Stonehenge and more, all in a guided Augmented Reality Tour.

Description

This app is an Augmented Reality (AR) tool designed for educational or personal use. It displays wonders of the world in virtual 3D through an android phone or tablet screen.

Education is the chosen scenario, and this application provides entertaining tools and visuals to improve the student engagement and concentration over more traditional methods of teaching.

Augmented Reality allows users to navigate and manipulate a 3-dimensional (3D) space with natural human motor functions compared to unnatural 3D manipulation using a touch screen or keyboard and mouse. The Technologically Mediated Experience of smart phone Augmented reality provides 3D location sensing of the device to be mapped onto the targeted image and displays the 3D models in the correct location and orientation to the human through the mediation calculated in real time on the smartphone.

Interaction Design

Entertaining and informative interactions are needed in this type of educational software to provide a memorable experience, key to learning and teaching. The application uses 2 types of interactions, entertainment interactions and informative interactions, the combination of both types provides a fun and memorable experience.

List of the interactions for the application:

Points of interest

You can point the phone at a Point Of Interest (POI). POIs are displayed on the phone screen with an orange dot at their location. When you point the screen at one, the title and description relating to that point of interest is displayed on screen. An example of this can be seen in the video above at [0:40]. A green rotating visual aid is also used to inform the user on which point of interest is selected.

Hide and Show UI

A checkbox in the top left corner of the screen lets you show or hide the on screen overlay that is used to show descriptions for points of interest on the 3D models. An example of this can be seen at [0:36] in the video above.

Page Flips

In order to navigate from one 3D model to another, the pages of the book can be flipped to the corresponding page. And other interactions surrounding that wonder appear.

Wonder Specific interaction

Each of the 3 wonders that are presented in AR for this app have their own unique interaction. Stonehenge has a slider to change the sun direction. The pyramid has an option to open it to see the internal chambers. And the Colosseum has a selection to view a small fight animation inside the arena.

Storyboard


Teacher introduces World's Greatest Wonders.	Teacher connects android tablet with World's Greatest Wonders AR App to class projector/screen.

Teacher flips through book to show different wonders.	Teachers uses the Points of Interest (POI) system to show how to use the app.

Teacher shows an example of wonder specific interactions.	Students take turns using the app on the android tablet while supervised by teacher.

Students write about their experiences and what they have learnt.

Technical Development

Unity game engine was used for the majority of development. Unity uses .NET C# as the programming language. The interface technology used to connect the real world and the virtual world through augmented reality is the Vuforia platform.

How to engage with available interactions

Points of interest. Move the phone/tablet so the red dot in the center of the screen is close to an orange dot (Point of interest). Make sure the UI checkbox is checked and a model is shown.
Hide/show UI. Tap the checkbox on the top left of the screen to hide or show the points of interest and other user interface (UI) components to get a better view of the model.
Page flips. Flip the pages on the book to move between models.
Wonder specific interaction. A conventional UI component (checkbox/slider/button, etc.) is displayed at the bottom of the screen. It can be interacted with in a conventional way using the phone screen.

3D models

Name	Description/purpose	Icon
Pyramid	Represents an Egyptian pyramid. Used on page 27 to show the pyramid in AR.
Pyramid Opened	Used on page 27 to show the pyramid's internal chambers in AR. Modified from the Pyramid model.
Stonehenge	Scan of Stonehenge. Modified from the original model, this one includes a fraction of the polygons and grass texture has been modified to have no shadows. Used on page 19 for AR.
Colosseum	Model of the Colosseum. Used on page 67 for AR.
Bear	Low poly black bear used for wonder specific interaction on page 67.
Lion	Low poly lion used for wonder specific interaction on page 67.