Team: Mahnoor Shahid, Madelaine Fischer-Bernhut, Nik Szafranek, Melissa Roberts
My Role: Game Development, 3D Modelling, Visual Design
Tools: Spacial 3D Audio, ARFoundation, Unity 3D, Blender Illustrator
Year: February 2019
AR Soundscapes - Toronto Safari
An AR app with a focus on animal species we share our urban habitat with. The idea of a safari is often first visualized as exploring a lush jungle in warmer regions; we often take for granted the species that live in our built environments and the lives they lead in parallel to ours.
Spacial Sound and the Player
The technique of spacial sound is used when the player must identify where the sound of an animal is located. As the player turns towards the animal, the sound gets louder and the animal appears. Once you tap on the animal, you take a “picture” for your safari album. The role of the film is designed to show which animals have already been “snapped”; the silhouette reveals the creature when it has been “photographed”.
The animals were modeled in Maya and brought into Unity. The 2D assets for the app were created in Affinity Designer and exported as SVGs.
Game Design and Development
The 3D models of animals, once brought into Unity, have 3 basic functions: emit sound, spawn on a plane in the camera’s field of vision, and disappear once tapped on by the user.
At any point in time, there can be up to 4 animals on the screen, once the user taps on an animal it disappears and another can spawn. We created a counter so the user can see how many animal photos they’ve collected.
The project was developed using the ARFoundation Plugin for Unity. One of the main challenges we faced was the issue of touch-raycasting on the correct target.
Demo
