VFX in AR using Merge AR Cube

Personal Work
#1

Hi everyone :slight_smile: I wanted to share what I’ve been working on at home this past month :slight_smile:

I picked up the AR Cube from Merge Labs at Wal-Mart for $14.99. I was super impressed by their app, I thought i’d have a go at the SDK for Unity. It was wasn’t as easy as I had thought! There were lots of kinks to figure out, what you can and cannot do in Augmented Reality using the cube, so far keeping all the shaders to mobile has been best to keep the frame high with little or no lag.

AR Ocean
inspired by Disney’s Finding Nemo

AR Earth Magnetic Field
(using the line renderer)

AR Fantasy Combat
(this is using Unity’s cinema system, particles, meshes,character animating,)

There are some tracking issues and I’ve been trying to find ways of hiding the cube, instead of making the model bigger, because even that has issues with it being further away from the phone camera. I’ll definitely post more r&d, and a tutorial will be coming :slight_smile:

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#2

This is crazy cool!
I had no idea this was a thing…how fun!
How are you finding the performance of the app?

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#3

Oh nice ! I worked with Vuforia too for a student project. It wasn’t easy at all but it was very funny (best way to learn to optimize xD)

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#4

Sorry for the late reply, been super busy with my new job. Performance wise, i think it depends on the phone, ive only tested it on my Pixel 1 so far. Biggest hurdle is getting it to deploy to the phone and align correctly, since the documentation is lacking :confused: