WIP - My favourite holiday destinations

Hey guys,

My name is Chris and I am the Product Manager here at ZapWorks. I decided to have a go creating a project for the augmented portal competition. I am by no means an expert at Studio, but I thought I would put a few hours aside to see what I could produce based on some of the learning materials that we have put out of the last couple of years.

The experience that I am building is based on my favourite holiday destinations that I have visited. The concept is that I can print out the target image, scan the code and be transported to some of the best places in the world!
Check it out by scanning the target image here.

By the way, not that I think it would, but as a Zappar employee I cannot win the competition. This one is just for fun!

Backrgound-image-zapcode|490

Some interesting problems I encountered:

  1. Rotating the door - When it came to creating the door opening animation, I realised that the rotation of the image could only be done from the middle of the image. This wouldn’t work as I needed it to act like it was hinged to the frame. I realised that if I put the image within a group, then I could position the image in such a way that by rotating the group, it meant the door opened exactly how I wanted it to.

  2. Flickering images - When I layered the different images on the target image, I placed them all at the same z-axis depth. This led to a strange flickering as the Zappar app tried to work out which image to present in what order. To solve this, I gave each of the layers a slightly different z depth (0.001) different, which appears to have solved the problem.

  3. Creating the different scenes - This was actually really simple. To create the second scene with the image in Hong Kong, I duplicated the timeline that I had created for the beach scene, added the plane material property to the new timeline and changed the materials at all of the keyframes. It worked perfectly.

  4. Creating the look for prompt - Last week we created this tutorial showing you how to add a look for template to your experience when the target image is not in view. I thought that this would be a great opportunity to add it - I think it looks really cool and makes the experience a bit more interesting!

Next steps that I would like to add to the experience :

  1. Door closing - I want to improve the experience so that the door closes when you either look away or move to the next experience. Currently the animation plays once and then the UI buttons simply switch the image being shown rather than playing the animation again.

  2. Playing a video - I have placed images behind my portal door, but I am tempted to put videos instead. In an ideal world I would have some awesome 3D scenes, although my 3D skills aren’t quite up to the job! Another option might be to add some different audio files on loop if I decide against video.

  3. File / package size - Currently my file size is about 11.5MB, which is way too large. I need to optimize my images and look at other ways to bring that down.

  4. Add more scenes - I quite like the idea of having a few more scenes to take people to. I like the way that the buttons are screen relative, and would continue to position them going up the right hand of the screen if I were to do so.

Please let me know if you have any ideas of how I can take this experience even further. I am hoping to find some more time to work on this, and I would really appreciate any ideas or tips that you might have.

Oh, and feel free to borrow / steal any of the concepts that I have used in my project for your own competition entries :slight_smile:

Cheers!

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