1st AR Project

Hello everyone,

We are a group of software engineering students: Yassin Aden, Pau Francino, Boris Llona and Roger Weber. We are taking a Mixed Reality course at VIA University in which we will learn about both Augmented and Virtual Realities from a practical approach.

In this DevBlog we will keep you updated on every step we take.

On our first project we have been assigned to do a basic AR game to get in touch with the technologies involved. This project is to be done using Unity5 to develop the game, and the extension "Vuforia" to display AR objects on the image targets. As none of the group members had any previous experience with those programs, we had to follow some online tutorials to learn the basics.

After a brainstorming session we collected the best ideas, evaluating them in terms of practicability, creativity and effort needed, and finally selected the idea we all liked the most taking in account the 2 weeks time limit: an Augmented Reality Air Hockey video game.

In order to get started with the game, we planned the project procedure, listing the steps that needed to be done:

• Creating Game Objects

• Applying physics

• Creating Movement Scripts

• Print the QR codes for the AR recognition

• Apply 3D animations to the markers

• Develop Game Logic

After learning the basics we still needed more specific knowledge, which we got from 2 videos we found on youtube. A 2D Air Hockey Unity tutorial where we learned how to actually build the game, but we had some problems with the renderer, as we were using 2D oriented methods as an example, so we also used a 3D AR Pong game tutorial to adapt it to the 3D space and furthermore for the Augmented Reality visualisation.

Moving on to the actual process of creating the game, we needed the following objects:

• Background: No physics

• Wall: Not movable, not controllable, rigid body

• Ground: Not movable, not controllable, no friction, rigid body

• Puck: Movable, not controllable, no friction, no gravity, rigid body

• Player: Movable, controllable, rigid body

To be able to implement and customize the behaviour of the game elements we used the following scripts:

• ResetBall():

    
        This script is called when the game starts and every time a goal is scored, it places the ball in the

        middle and gives it a movement towards a random direction in a given range.

• Update() for the Ball:

        This script is executed every frame, it updates the position of the Ball

• OnCollisionEnter():

        This script is responsible for the Ball's behaviour whenever it collides with any other object in the

        game, including the goals.

• Update() for the Player:

        This script not only updates the players position but it keeps the camera attached to the particular         player to keep track on it by raycasting.

Finally, we added the AR functionality using the Vuforia extension following the indications on Unity's webpage.

This is how the game looks like:

The link to our work is the following: https://github.com/Yasin-0109/AR-AIR-HOCKEY-Game That's all for our first project, we will be posting new cool stuff every week about Mixed Reality.