Augmented Gardens
Designing gardens in Augmented Reality
Created on 20th October 2019
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Augmented Gardens
Designing gardens in Augmented Reality
The problem Augmented Gardens solves
In luxurious hotels and residential housing complexes, the creative minds that go behind designing the garden and lawns often face trouble when communicating their thoughts to clients through their 2D designs. We developed a mobile application, with Augmented Reality capabilities, using which the designer can show the client exactly what the garden looks like and customize it quickly with the feedback he or she gets.
The application has a separate segment(AR mode) that provides a bunch of 3D virtual models of various plants, flowers and decor stuff that can be placed in the real world with real-time scaling, rotating and moving around the models around in the user's real environment. With features like location tracking, customized recommendations to choose from, and a detailed catalog of plants we are thinking of scaling the application furthermore in future. We have also integrated expert advice through video conferences using the Agora API.
The application hence prevents communication gaps between the client and the garden designer (or design agencies).
Running more design iterations on this product should fetch the designing agency happy clients, which are of course important for running any business and developing useful products.
Challenges we ran into
Augmented Reality is an evolving technology and is difficult to keep up with the rapid changes. Infact desiging and conceptualizing an AR experience requires significant amount of imagination and knowledge. Integrating this was quite a challenge as the SDK that we used did not satisfy one of our product requirements. We still took a chance, developed the feature ourselves successfully and deployed it in our application. There is also a technical constraint that involves combining the AR module and the android project. This support is going to be released in a future update in the year 2020 (as announced in Unity Copenhagen 2019 event). So eventually we will be able to combine the modules together.
Technologies used