My Experience with Building Marker-Based AR
Currently, I am working on my Focus at The Knowledge Society (TKS). The Knowledge Society is a program for students to learn about technology, world problems, and real world skills that are not taught in school. Everyone in TKS is given the opportunity to do a Focus. A Focus is where a student chooses a technology and learns about the tech in a span of a few months. The technology I chose was Augmented Reality. AR has aspects of design and art, and I really enjoy those things. That was the main reason I chose the technology. Now that I know more about it, I also think AR had potential to change our day-to-day lives. I think AR is a really interesting tech, and I have taken the time to do a couple projects to learn more about how to create an AR application on my own.
Replicates🛠
The Focus project has three steps. A learn article, replicate, and create. The learn article is where you learn about the tech for a couple weeks and write an article about what you found. The replicate is when you find projects that have already been done and replicate them to get a better understanding of the tech. The last step is the create, that is where you take everything you know and create something on your own without a tutorial. Right now, I am starting my create, but here I am showcasing what I have done for my replicates. I posted a separate article on my first replicate called My First Experience with Augmented Reality, and since then I have completed two other replicates. I have worked on a Web Marker-based AR project, and I created a Snap Chat Filter with Lens Studio.
Marker-based AR with A-frame
This is the tutorial I followed https://aframe.io/blog/arjs/. The tutorial is about creating marker-based AR on the web. It uses A-frame and AR.js. For my first replicate, the model was a basic cube and it was provided within the tutorial. For this replicate, I decided to add my own model. At the time, I didn’t have a model which I wanted to use so I added some text. If you are looking for a fun and beginner tutorial for AR, this is project is a good choice.
This project was quick and fun, but I felt like I still didn’t know as much as I wanted to know before I start my create. Then I started looking into platforms that AR developers are using and I came across Lens Studio.
Lens Studio
Lens Studio is Snap Chats filter maker. Anyone can download Lens Studio and create and publish their own filter, and the community of Lens Studio is really nice. For my first project with Lens Studio, I was mostly just figuring out how to use the program and looked at tutorials on Lens Studio for that. I also tried to guess what things did by looking at the name of them. Because I didn’t really know what I was doing when I made my filter, its not that great, but for my first try I think its fine. I did it by drawing the model that goes on the face using Clip Studio. I drew two hearts and made them into a png. The hearts would go on the cheeks. Then I uploaded them into Lens Studio and added it to the project. At first they were too small for the face, so I shaped them to fit the face. Then I added pink coloured eyes. I saw this option when I was scrolling through all of the things you can add, and I thought it looked cool. This project was different from the other ones I have completed and it was nice to experiment and get creative. This filter was pretty basic, but I can tell that there are many more things I can do just by drawing and uploading my drawing into Lens Studio. I plan to do more with Lens Studio in the future to learn more about the program and AR, and also for fun!
Next Steps 🎯
Another platform for creating AR is Unity. Unity is like Lens Studio, but there are more things you can create and it is usually for game development. I don’t know much about Unity yet, but I plan to make my create on Unity and ARcore Elements. I want to do something with interactive AR, and something that can impact day-to-day lives.
I am very excited to move forward with my project, and if you would like to see more, stay tuned!
