Unit 5 - Augmented Reality Project with Yellow Design

For our final unit of year 1, we completed a 4 week project with Yellow Design, an augmented reality company, based in Northern Ireland. They asked us to pitch an idea for an AR app that could be used in Oxford Street to boost tourism. I was excited to be introduced to AR, as it has always seemed exciting to me. I was also looking forward to focusing on the design part of a professional project.

Firstly, we were split into groups. After the success of our last group project, I was keen to work in a group again and experience working with different people on a different brief.

The first task was to brainstorm some ideas. We decided to focus more on the history side of Oxford Street, rather than the commercial aspect of it, as we thought that this would be more interesting. We did some research into the history of Oxford Street and found that many of the buildings have been through major developments over the years. Because of this, we decided that we would focus on showing the development of different significant buildings.

For our centralised object, we decided on a lamp post that would have a sign for each building you can learn about. When you select a building, the lamp post will light up and a miniature model of that building will appear on a pedestal, along with an information panel on the history of the building.

Once we had decided on our idea, we wrote a pitch to present to Yellow Design:

"With our AR app, a signpost would appear through your phone, displaying several significant historical sites on Oxford Street. The user will be able to tap on the site they would like to learn about. A panel will appear with information on that site, as well as a miniature 3D model of the building, which would play a drawing animation, showing the development of that site."

We decided that each member of our group would take on researching and sketching one historical site. I decided to look into the Pantheon, which is now a Marks and Spencer shop. I also took on the design of the centralised lamp post.

After doing research on each location and refining our idea, we decided to create some 3D pre-visualisation to present to Yellow Design to clearly show how the app would work.

I modelled the lamp post, pedestal and information panel and animated these along with Han's building model to show the movement of the objects and how the AR would look.

We then presented our idea to Yellow Design along with the other groups. After this meeting, they decided to go forward with two ideas: Gulliver's Travels and Underground London. I was put into the Gulliver's travels group.

This meant that I was working with 14 others - this large group size made communication difficult but also meant that we had a variety of different skills and could get a lot of work and ideas out quickly.

I first worked on some app visualisation to show Yellow Design how the AR would look through the phone. Our concept was that the AR would be a game where the user would help Gulliver find his missing objects.

I used Procreate to draw a simple piece of concept art, showing how the AR would be set out.

Next, I worked on some 3D modelling in Blender. I modelled two of the objects Gulliver has lost: an arrow and a quill. I had to make sure that the poly count remained low and to not use textures, as this would make the file size bigger.

Next, I worked on some building modelling. We took inspiration from Amsterdam houses to model terraced townhouses. To make them look more interesting, we tried to make them a bit wonky and unbalanced - I used the sculpt tool to do this.

After presenting our work to Yellow Design and Westminster City Council, they wanted to see more refinement in our concept design and they also wanted us to remove any weaponry, such as the arrow.

Following these suggestions, we decided to revisit our building designs. We looked into the actual text of Gulliver's Travels and found that the Lilliputian's fashion is described as a mix of Asian and European style. We decided to go with this style for the buildings as well.

We first had to find inspiration, so we looked at both Asian and European architecture. One major source of inspiration was Romani houses. The Romania are an Indo-Aryan people, who originated from the Northern Indian sub-continent but then migrated to Europe - this means that their architecture has both European and Asian influences. We decided to specifically look at Romani houses found in Romania, as there is a large Romani population there.

Drawing from these inspirations, I completed some concept art for potential building designs.

After doing these designs, other members of the team went on to model the final buildings. We had another meeting with Yellow Design where they asked for a short animatic to show how Gulliver would move. I went on to do this, using Procreate and Final Cut Pro. I took reference photos of myself to help with drawing the different movements of Gulliver. I then put the drawings into Final Cut Pro and added ambient sounds.

Another thing Yellow Design were unsure about was how Gulliver's journal would work. In order to make this really clear to them, I created an animatic from the user's perspective to show how the journal would operate when there is new information. I used Procreate and Final Cut Pro to do this.

At our final meeting with Yellow Design, they were happy with our outcomes and understood everything clearly. Overall, I am satisfied with the work that I have produced for this unit. I feel that my team work skills have improved, as well as my digital drawing. There were some difficulties with the large group size and the struggles of working with a client, however I felt that we overcame these and that they also gave me valuable experience of how a realistic work environment would run.