AR Children’s story book
Teaching math through fairy tales
Digital studio practices
Research lead
Pawitra Chatrittichaikul
(UX)
Design Lead
George Frost
Researcher/analysist
Preeti Choudhay (UX)
Programmer
Orhan Ogulcan Coskunol
Animator
Jawaher AlMeer
Content designer
Moeez ul Atiq (UX)
1. Augmented Reality
The project required to target the book’s pages which can be classified as “image targets”. Since using augmented reality for this purpose needed less camera sensitivity, more efficiency with easy development options and multiplatform support for Android and iOS, we decided to use Vuforia technology. Vuforia had fast response to continuous development on the book’s pages with the feature of simple image installation.
Vuforia has its own database package creator for Unity and other engines. After importing image targets with matching size values, ImageTarget Behaviour script of Vuforia’s Unity SDK gives option to select from these imported image targets from the project’s assets.
The application has 5 image targets for the book’s pages and 3 of them triggers 3 different user interface mini games when targets are detected by the AR camera. Each target has its own behaviour to the response of AR camera detection. In addition, the 3D models and their animations presented like a scene at some parts of the book when the image targets triggered by the AR camera.
2. Development
To control the page scene management, there is a “Level Starter” which makes the change of the behaviour of each page. Furthermore, this script referenced and its function has been used in DefaultTrackableEventHandler of Vuforia to trigger it.
The responses of the book’s pages which have the mini games have been implemented with their own scripts. These pages are the first, the second and the third pages. The scene scripts start to run when their parent image targets are triggered by the AR camera. The purposes of these scripts is to display the mini games on arranged times. Nevertheless, only the first page has the waiting time for the trigger of the mini game, others have not.
The first page waits for the dragon’s animation with a counter. A function continuously run until the counter reachs the specified value. This method is used to control the animation and set disable the game object after the animation has finished. After this function returns a boolean true, the first mini game appears on the screen which is a digital clock with button behaviours of increasing the hour and the minute of it. The clock has the control of the change on the window’s appearance with changing the texture of it, triggering the animation of Georgie and displaying other expected clocks. After entering 3 correct answers, the expected clock sets disabled and the text of saying “success!” sets enabled. In addition, the 3D objects in the page such as the digital clock and the door have responsive effects. Touching the door triggers its opening animation and the digital clock makes a small movement. Each of these responses controlled with “Start Anim” script.
The second page of the book has a recipe completion mini game. With the 3 pages and 3 steps on each page, this game checks if the selected object’s ID matches with the one that requested. Random function selects the requested ingredient’s id between 0 to 6, the number of the requested ingredient between 2 to 6. If the IDs match, number of the wanted item decreases until it becomes 0 and changes to a different ID. After completing all the steps, the end of the ingredient book sets active. For extra, the pot which is a 3D object has a response to the user’s touch with a cooking fire effect with the same script that has been used at the first page.
The third page has not waiting time for displaying the mini game which is a drag and drop game. Dragging and dropping are handled with DragHandler interfaces from Unity’s Event System. When the user drags a coin, the Coin script gets the value of it from the text inside of it and passes this value as a parameter to the Coin Game script. In this script, there are random generated requested Pound and Penny which have ranges between 1 to 7 and 1 to 100. These random generators run only at the beginning of the game. After the dragged coin pulled to the close position of the piggy bank, the coin object gets return to the its own start position, requested Pound or Penny gets a decrease based on the type and value of the coin. To control the decrease of requested money, there are separate functions and these functions also check if the all wanted value is completed. If it is, the text on top of the mini game changes to “Success!” text. Additionally, interaction with the 3D pile of coins returns a yellow shining effect with the Start Anim script.
Since the fourth page and the cover page have no mini games, they still have 3D models and their own environments. The cover page has also a rising bubbles effect that runs nonstop. At the fourth page, there is also a touch response of the Georgie model. As a result of interaction, the effect of flying butterflies appear on the screen for specific duration.
The application also has a restart option which is meant to restart a finished mini game or any animations in the pages. To do this, the restart option reloads the current Unity scene in the application.
3. Testing
With the advantage of multiplatform support of Unity 3D, the tests of this application have been made on Android and iOS mobile devices. However, some problems occurred when switching the platform of the application yet with the change at some properties and with determining the problems in the scripts in the project, the iOS version of application worked smoothly and with no errors.
REFERENCES
Apartment Door, Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/apartment-door-146225
Customizable Furniture, Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/furniture/customizable-bedroom-72562
Earth & Planets skyboxes, Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/textures-materials/sky/earth-planets-skyboxes-53752
Fantasy Effect, Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/particles/fantasy-effect-50310
Gold Coins, Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/gold-coins-1810
Particles – Bubbles, Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/particles/environment/particles-bubbles-27797
Potions, Coin and Box of Pandora Pack, Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/potions-coin-and-box-of-pandora-pack-71778
Too Many Items: Kitchen Props, Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/too-many-items-kitchen-props-127635
Vuforia SDK for Unity 3D, Available at: https://developer.vuforia.com/downloads/sdk