This Life on Mars, Augmented Reality project was motivated, by the series "The Expanse". I'd originally created a Martian landscape project, where an asteroid hits back in 2011. There's been some buzz about getting to mars then, in a serious way. Mars, and the potential for human settlement on mars, has motivated a number of famous feature films. Mars attacks, Total Recall and now the Expanse. This project was originally craeted in Vue Xstreme, where a terrain map of mars, had been used to create a terrian. And a bio dome sphere, based on what was in the films was created. A basic cityscape, sits inside the dome. With somewhat futuristic looking buildings. And you have a space craft orbiting the scene.
The render above was created in Vue Xstreme, which now has a very good Global Illumination based render, and a node based advanced material editor, which lends some degree of relaism to the lighting.
Commercial applications of "Quick" AR
On previous projects, I worked with brands, looking to leverage the power of Augmented reality, in order to promote their brand. This technology, allows users to have a tactile feel of the product/brand. They can place it on a surface rotate it, scale it, we can add animations that play on certain events. Music and audio as well. We can also create portals. That the user can enter. Virtual worlds. This has been used by brands such as Dior. All this without the need for complicated coding. All presented in an easy usable manner through the relevant platform. Almost everyone is now on facebook, instagram and Snapchat. This means there is no need to install additional software to use all this. Get in touch today to learn more.
Mars Dome in Augmented Reality
I'd previously created a number commercial, Augmented reality projects, for agency clients. But could not show, or disclose them, as we'd worked under a Non Disclosure agreement. So I decided to try and make this a personal project.
The goal of this project was, though, to create the above for Augmented reality. The easiest way to do this was to use Snapchat's Lens Studio. Spark AR, is also an option, but as I'd previously created a number of commercial projects in Lens studio. It made sense to use it. The challenge here was to take a 10 million plus polygon scene, and somehow create it in a platform that allows for a maximum of 4MB maximum for a lens (AR app). Lens studio has been updated since I last used it with a better material editor, as well as better user interactivity tools. I initially tried to do this in Spark AR, but the shader set, lacked a basic specular/reflective transparent material option. Which is somewhat disappointing.
Using lens studio's Surface tracker, I created the following lens
You can test out the lens by taking a pic of this snapcode:
