RYOICHIRO OKA
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Sightsync

Photo-realistic Time-traveling in Mobile Augmented Reality

Summary

Overview

Sightsync is a retrospective Augmented Reality application, which enabled the school's alumni group to tour in virtually reconstructed campus in 1970s. The photo-realistic campus was crafted with photo & topological references and delivered with the help of Unity & Google Tango technology.

Development

We were very fortunate to have received references from the school's alumna group, including yearbooks which contained 500+ photographs taken in the campus in 1940s-1970s. We then took our time to manually identify each of their locations, so we can begin reconstructing the campus.

We used several modeling tools to reconstruct the campus: SketchUp to model the geometry, Maya to tweak & reformat and Quixel to create PBR materials.

Using Google Tango, we were able to scan & save the entire campus in a device's local storage, so that the AR anchoring could start & maintain on its own. As our users walked around in the campus, our app was able to precisely follow the current location and actively correct drifts without a user input.

Challenges

We had to end up limiting our app's "usable time" to nighttime, due to the fundamental issue in a large-scale outdoor anchoring: the daytime's constantly-changing location of the sun interfered with the anchoring algorithm, which relied on the color of specific points in the space.
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We used photos from 1940s-1970s (top) to reconstruct the campus (bottom).
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We collected and identify locations of 500+ photos on the top of a topology map from 1970s.

Archives

  • Sketches, Mood Boards, Prototypes
  • Final Presentation
  • Git Repository

Team

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Ryoichiro Oka
Lead Developer & Artist
BSc in Applied Computer Science at ​Woodbury University

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Jesse Gilbert
Technical ​Adviser
Chair of Applied Computer Science ​at Woodbury University

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Theo Mayer
​Adviser
President at TechApplication.com, LLC

Contact me at [email protected] or SNS below.
© 2015-2021 Ryoichiro Oka
  • Home
  • Sightsync
  • Rokushoji
  • Synth Space
  • Victorian
  • Hobby