AR Production

Hi! Testing the AR has been a bigger challenge than I anticipated. I had made the AR experience into different QR codes but it was not the best experience as the user would have to open a new experience each time they flipped a page in the zean. This led us to make an app inside the AR experience which would direct the user to the different AR experiences from 1 QR code. The issue with this was that the app used a different coding language than the one we had used to create the different experiences. We were ultimately able to make the different experiences work inside the app except one of them.

I had imagined the first AR experience native vs nonnative trees to be an experience where the user would be surrounded by the different trees but this was not working as planned. Each user had a different environment they would open the experience in which caused issues. This led to us switching to a button based experience where the user is able to switch between the different trees than open infront of them which they are able to go around and see. The second AR experience was intended to be a 3D animation on top of the zean but after testing we came to a conclusion to render the 3D animation as a 2D video and have it play inside the zean place holder. The 3rd AR experience after testing seemed to be working great. This experience was intended to have the user tap the screen to create their own microforest. We had planned to have different trees that the user could be able to use to create their microforest but due to technical difficulties we had to settle for using just 1 tree that the user could use to tap and place the tree. The additional feature I added to this was the ability to move the tree after it had been placed so the user had more flexibility in personalizing their experience.

We were able to make these changes in time to have the experience set up for when we got the final assets from the 3D team but that had its own set of challenges. When we imported those assets into 8th wall the size of files were bigger than the maximum limit of 8th wall so we had to downsize the quality of the models. We were able to import the assets eventually but we had to compromise the quality of the assets in order to make AR experiences work. This is just the nature of these kinds of experiences which we learned the hard way. In a nutshell, we are on track with testing the experiences and I am positive this will be finalized in the next 2 weeks.