Sightsync

Photo-realistic Time-traveling in Mobile Augmented Reality

Summary

Product

Sightsync is an Augmented Reality (AR) application, which enables viewing 1970's landscape of Woodbury University as photo-realistic virtual world through smartphone screen. The 3D reconstruction was crafted via topological and historical survey with a support of senior alumna group.

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Development

Google Tango (former ARCore) was used to precisely align the virtual world to the physical world, relative to user's position and heading while user moves around in 200 miles² area of the campus.

The entire campus was scanned first and saved in the product app as an Area Description File (ADF) for the alignment to work without user input. The scanning was done at night to take advantage of the constant lighting environment for an optimal performance of the alignment, though limiting the user experience to nighttime only.

Several modeling tools were used for the 3D reconstruction, including SketchUp for quick prototyping of general geometry, Maya for retopologizing, and Quixel for creating photo-realistic materials in Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) workflow.

Reconstruction is based on resources from an alumna group of the school, especially 500+ photographs from their archived yearbooks. Those photographs' location was identified on topological maps provided by the campus maintenance department.

Unity3D was used to materialize the 3D reconstruction on the top of Google Tango on Android devices.

Reconstruction is based on photographs and blueprints.

500+ photographs are collected and identified in the blueprint of the campus in 1970's.

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Archives

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

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Team

Ryoichiro Oka
Lead Developer & Artist
BSc of Media Technology
at ​Woodbury University

Jesse Gilbert
Technical ​Adviser
Chair of Media Technology
​at Woodbury University

Theo Mayer
​Adviser
President
at TechApplication.com, LLC