In our efforts to always be trying something different and new, we came up with the thought that we’d like to try our hand at an augmented reality application for mobile phones. We were looking at a pitch with the Discovery Channel at the time and AR tech was still fairly new and shocking to people back then. Seemed a great way to impress people. Still does as a matter of fact.
So the idea was to create a brochure that outlined all of the features and things that different sites were saying about us and our flagship product – the Cross PC desk – and inside of the brochure would be a marker that when viewed through a mobile phone, would display a real-time 3d version of the product. This required me to first design the basic brochure and insert which then went out to a freelancer to finish up so that I could focus on the rest of the project.
I had to rebuild the 3d model from the ground up to be as low-poly as possible so that a mobile phones GPU could render it easily – without sacrificing any detail. The original Cross desk model is around 15.4 million poly’s – this one was just over 25,000. Then I had to design an adequate tracking image so that the application could orient the 3d model correctly when viewed from any direction. We decided on creating an Android specific application because the OS is more prevalent worldwide than any other mobile OS. We enlisted the help of a freelance programmer for the application bundling and after a bit of tweaking all the details we had a fully working and awesome looking end product. Finished up the accents and different alterations that needed to be made to the overall brochure, and then everything was sent off to the printers.
