Super Mario AR demo by Stuart Langfield.


The circular format in this demo looks really interesting, Stuart. How did you come up with this?

“ Figuring out a good format was a big challenge, since I was taking a 2D game and applying it to physical 3D space. I first built in a traditional left to right 2D platformer style, but during testing I realized the level was becoming massive. It would be very hard to place in a physical environment whilst retaining a sense of scale. It also involved a lot of walking. So it was becoming hard to keep up with Mario!

After some brainstorming I decided to try a circular format. To test this out I had to rebuild Mario’s movement controllers so that he was fixed to a specific circumference. I had to play with the scale of the scene, so that the user wasn’t rotating their body too quickly and becoming dizzy. I’ve had a few people test the prototype at different stages and the reactions have been generally positive, although it always took them a few minutes to get used to the controls and the format. ”

Another novel UX element is the star grab power-up. Can you give us some insight into your process and your opinion on these kinds of gameplay elements that are unique to AR?

“ After finalizing the circular game format, I still felt like there was an element missing from the game, a stronger reasoning behind why someone should play in AR. I looked at traditional Mario games and noticed that power-ups are always a key component. Adding those in so that Mario could pick them up as normal, however, felt off. I wanted to find a way to involve the player in a deeper way, outside of controlling Mario directly. That’s when I hit on the idea of positioning power-ups out of Mario’s reach, meaning the player has to directly grab them and give them to Mario. I believe that building upon these kinds of unique interactive elements will be key to retaining the attention of player’s in AR games.

I think it’s crucial for us to find ways of adding unique game play elements into AR apps as I feel the novelty aspect of AR won’t last that long. Player’s standards for what constitutes a good AR game will rapidly evolve over the next couple of years. It’s like the early days of cinema, and similar to a lot of challenges VR has faced. Applying traditional paradigms to this new space doesn’t necessarily work without at least some modification. There’s a lot of undiscovered UX and storytelling formats in AR, and that’s part of what makes it so exciting! ”

Are you planning to continue exploration on this demo?

“ I might refine the Mario demo a little more, but the next step for me is to take the learning from this prototype and put it into another product of some kind. And that definitely includes a product that other people can experience. I’d love to get something in the app stores! ”


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Realistic AR brush texture paintings with deep learning style transfer by the ever so creative @Laan Labs. This photo stylization tool is part of their Air Measure kit.


How did this particular feature come about, Jason?

“Well, hanging art on your wall is fun, but it’s even better when it’s a painting of your child or pet. Custom artwork can be expensive, so we’re exploring how AR paintings can give a similar experience. AR decoration and design is a really exciting area and it’s just getting started thanks to ARKit and ARCore.

I think we’ll see more automatic design tools being developed based on computer vision in tandem with AR. Our goal with AirMeasure was to let people measure and design anything, so this is just one more tool in the toolbox so to speak. We have lots of ideas for improvements though, so stay tuned.”

Can you elaborate a bit on the deep learning part of the tool?

“We’re taking the styles from well-known works of art, for instance van Gogh’s "The Starry Night”. The way it works is, we train a neural network to pickup stylistic components of existing paintings. The user’s photo is then transformed using the neural network so that it retains the overall structure but gains the stylistic elements of the image the network was trained on. Getting a realistic brush stroke texture was important here to be able to create the illusion of a real painting. So that took some effort to get right.

We’ve been experimenting with neural networks for while, and this is the first time we have used CoreML (Apple’s machine learning network) in an app that we have released. We’ve seen other AR & deep learning experiments, mostly with object recognition, but I’m convinced that the most exciting applications are yet to come.“


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AR Cartoon Prototype by @JonathanForder at Discover Studios.


Jonathan, how did you come up with this idea? 

“I’m a big fan of animation and cartoons, so I wanted to create a small prototype to demonstrate how AR could expand the world of existing cartoons, bring them into our homes! One of my favourite cartoon styles is The Amazing World of Gumball, I love the mixture of animated character blended into real world scenes and this pretty much lends itself to AR perfectly.

Although this is a simple prototype it shows how we can bring characters to life. As a kid I would have loved to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Thundercats running around my front room!”

How did you go about creating the prototype? 

“With Unity and ARkit it’s a really smooth process to get something up and running fairly quickly. The only problem is if you haven’t developed for iOS for awhile or are new to it, so be prepared to wait for a lot of downloads/updates to finish! 

The first thing that made this prototype work was finding the right material. Luckily enough with a quick google search I found some dedicated fans that had made some blue screen cutout clips of the characters. With these videos I could then bring them into Unity and create a Chroma Key shader to remove the blue from the clips. Then it was just a matter of placing them in the scene and setting Unity to render the shadows and allow for placement in AR." 

What tools did you use?

Unity3D 2017 & the Apple ARKit Plugin for Unity 


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“Model3AR” by @JelmerVerhoog. Subscribe for updates on Jelmer’s app →  http://bit.ly/2vEXtUI

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