Project Overview

AR Yearbook was my Senior Project in high school at Massachusetts Academy For Math and Science. I chose this project with the help of my mentor at the time, Adoniram Sides, who was the New Media Manager at Checkerboard, a printing company in which I interned as a front-end developer. Adoniram knew that I had a deep interest in 3D and innovative technology from all the side projects and games I was making at the time, so he suggested I look into the emerging Augmented Reality field. Upon further research, I fell in love and knew this would be something I would want to do for the rest of my life. To get started on my journey, I made an AR app that gave each of 50 students in my class a 3D model on their yearbook page. I collaborated with the yearbook team and made it so each page had a unique 2D marker printed on it, which when viewed from the mobile application, would present a unique and custom 3D model for each student.

Technologies Used
Software
Objective-C
Java
ARToolkit
Blender, Cinema4D
Hardware
None
What I Worked On

Although ARToolkit provides much of the code for machine vision and rendering, I reviewed and modified the code (Objective-C and Java) to my needs, and built out the project into iOS and Android apps. I 3D modeled a majority of the 50 models (one for each student), but received assistance on some of the more complex models from my mentor Adoniram Sides, who is a trained expert in Cinema4D.

What I Learned

I learned a lot about 3D modeling and mobile app development from this project. I had some prior experience with 3D modeling from the small side projects I was working on in high school, but I really gained a lot of knowledge and practice when I spent over 100 hours making 3D models for this project. I had no mobile app development experience before this, so it was an adventure to discover how XCode, Objective-C, Android Studio, and Java work. Not only did I gain the coding knowledge, but also I gained practice in being able to figure out and effectively use new software, as well as debugging issues in completely new environments.