Student Post: Adam Kral on AR and VR Development

Guest post by Adam Kral (’20) on his summer work for Academic Technology.

So far over the summer I have been working on two projects: an augmented reality app to display images related to Buddhism and a sky diving simulator in virtual reality. Both projects have been built using the Unity game engine. The Buddhism app started with a two-dimensional slider that manipulated an image above it, as shown below.

I then converted this app to use augmented reality using AR Toolkit 5. When the camera is shown the background image, the images are now shown in three-dimensional space. The slider has been replaced with a joystick to manipulate the images. The finished product is shown below.

In addition to this AR app, I have been building a virtual reality sky diving simulator for the HTC Vive. The player controls their drag, x-y movement, and rotation via the movement of the controllers. This movement is tracked by determining the controllers’ positional relation to the headset. There is still work that needs to be done, such as adding colliders and textures to buildings. Some screenshots from inside the headset are below.