Posted October 27, 2023 by Jakob Thalbitzer Thiberg
Simplify your design process for either architects or architectural draftsmen. See your creations in real life, right on your phone before finalizing the product.
No design revisions since last assignment, only design enhancements, as in models added to the application rather than the placeholders.
For Architectural Draftsman AR Tool, augmented reality (AR) was chosen to build the application by using Unity and AR Core. Unity was chosen for its compatibility with AR Core. The project began by setting up basic AR features, including floor and wall tracing. It then enabled object placement and manipulation. Overcoming the challenge of placing multiple objects required external resources, particularly the "Augmented Reality (AR) tutorial with Unity (Make Real-world Applications)" by JoystickLab. Further development is that more items than what can initially be seen, can be selected, and placed in the application, and general visual enhancement.
The key functionality of the application, is three things:
These functionalities are working due to Unity’s built-in functionalities, such as the UI scrolling, and the three scripts the application consists of.
As seen in the image above, there is a couch, a chair, and a plant, there is also a green plant, which is just represented by a white square for the moment being. These are all placeable objects in the application, and they are all imported from the Unity Asset Store.
Each 3D model is used for the same purpose, to represent what they would look like if placed into the real world, as a preview before the final placement is done in real life.
For testing the current state of the application, the focus is on functionality, ease of use, satisfaction, and if the user could see themselves use this in their work life.
Since I have a good friend that’s worked as a draftsman before, and both my parents are architects, I contacted them and used them to test the application.
I was the one conducting the tests since I have worked with the application alone. Therefore, I observed how they interacted with the application, and guided them in how to use the application when there were any complications
I found that there were some awkward issues with the way objects were being placed, and that they seemed to be floating rather than being placed on the ground. Another issue was that multiple objects can be spawned on accident when scrolling through the inventory.
It was however appreciated, that it was possible to scroll through a scalable inventory of items, and that they appear once you click on their icon.
From the goal of this testing session, I now know what the focus of the future development of this application is. The first thing to work on is the placement of the objects, secondly is multiple objects spawning without them wanted to be spawned.
Working on expanding the scrollable feature that worked well, would be to have a burger menu where the user can choose what type of items they want to place, and then have a scrollable view of the type of items they want to place.
The people it was tested on can see the application be applicable, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done before it is there.
No changes has been made since the testing session, but plans to further work on the application are being made.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb1h4A0yB978SQuAeBsxup--7ITPCashH
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/furniture/hdrp-furniture-pack-153946
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/vegetation/plants/plants-150261