my media submission c

ARCHDRC 373

Submission C

Dimitar Penchev

University of Auckland

2011

ID:3300527

Can we enhance the experience of Queen Street in Auckland and bring aspects of its history up to the surface? Bringing to light of what used to be there in the digital age is possible with the newly emerging augmented reality technology.

In my project I used the Junaio developers website and their iphone application. This augmented reality operating system provides several different ways for enhancing reality. One method is to use XML (Extensible Makeup Language), which is commonly used by website developers. The script can make 3D animations, videos, audio and links to websites to pop up on our mobile phone screens as we experience the real world. So to speak augmented reality adds another dimension to the real world.

However in my case generating my own XML script would be a struggle, so I used an existing template and by changing some of the settings I tried to broadcast a message with cultural significance. What I was hoping to achieve was to make and display a 3D image of the landscape hidden by the buildings, the pavement of the sidewalks and the asphalt surface of the streets. One would be able to see what a normal central street presents tall buildings, a river of people, a river of cars, shops, neon lights, traffic lights. At the same time, what actually sits underneath the landscape which got completely covered up under heavy lid of concrete will be displayed too.

Dimitar Penchev ID:3300527

The landscape interested me in its three dimensional form. As if it were a sculpture, one could appreciate its folds and furrows from an artists point of view. What appeared like a hand laying in the landscape of Coxs Creek in Auckland fascinated me and I was hoping to introduce my sculptural appreciation of the land underneath Queen Street.

My 3D model of Coxs Creek worked when I tested it at home, but before moving onto a Queen Street model a practical problem emerged. The 3D model triggered by specific GPS coordinates was actually stalking me for quite a long time after going past the coordinates of my POI (point of interest) on the map. The consequence of this is that the person who would be seeing the model on his sreen will have it blocking his view for quite a while and this would not be desirable. I made the model semi-transparent, but still the idea of looking at Queen Street continuously through a semi transparent image of the landscape while walking from one end to the other may not be that exciting either.

Perhaps it would be more interesting to have a number of 3D objects appear one after the other in succession, as if walking through a gallery. Each object will add to the collective experience and one would never get bored as the anticipation for the next objects peculiarity will be provoking everybodys interest.


Collectively the objects will create awareness of what actually is under our feet. The uniqueness of the landscape, the distinctive ridges and dips mark the identity of a site. Because of the specific features of the landscape in central Auckland, Queen Street used to be a river. The river is now channelled through a pipe and is still flowing down to the sea but no one can see or experience it. It marks the uniqueness of Queen Street, but this mark of identity is hidden under a meter or so of concrete and asphalt.

I experimented with a number of objects which could speak of the river such as fountains, waterfalls, rapids, but those are not easy to make and unfortunately appear as solid objects rather than creating the feel of a liquid. It is not impossible for a solid to create the sense of fluidity though. And this is a challenge for any sculptor or designer.

So to speak, my 3ds max models were a poor representation of water and relied mainly on the texture, which when I think in retrospective was the wrong approach. At the time I found it hard to make a water-like object as augmented reality supports relatively low resolution and modelling of water is quite demanding when it comes to vertices. So an abstract solid form that represents a fluid would be more interesting to play with.


Later on the idea of objects which speak of water indirectly came up. I modelled canoes and eels and they collectively mean river. You cannot have a river at that particular place in Auckland if it wasnt for the specific topography of the hills on both sides.

The texture of the objects has a significant importance in the way they are perceived. The sail boat was very successful in conveying the idea of water and perhaps sea. The texture is strong and vivid and gives the 3D model a convincing presence. Due to errors in the converting of the 3ds file into md2 format the form looks broken up and shabby, which seems to work with the abstract nature of the texture. This makes the idea of water come forward, while the technical side of the model becomes irrelevant.

The eel is just brown, perhaps some sliminess would have helped but definitely what is missing is movement. If I was able to make the eel swim away upon touching it on the screen the association with a real flowing river would be inevitable.

My model of the wooden canoe looks well manufactured but precision and mass production comes to mind. Here the idea of water cannot be felt that strongly. Again an animation of it bobbing on the water could have turned the tables.


I chose to evoke the appearing of these objects on the screen with trackeing images. This way of triggering an augmented reality experience has several advantages. The models do not stalk you and you can go and look at them from different angles. Technically it is easier to work with Junaio Glue, which automatically generates the XML script and all I had to do was to upload my files on the website. I also got to play with the marker images which generate the AR experience. This is important because the markers could be made to relate to the 3D models and to the environment on the street itself.

My first marker worked well straight away. I think this is because I was thinking of the pixelated nature of digital technology and the square units of a woven Polynesian or Maori sail when I was drawing it with a black marker. Perhaps the sail being triangular helped too, as any round objects looks the same from all angles. Finally I did some tweeks in photoshop, such as inverting the colors. This resulted in the image turning white and purple, which is what boat plans used to look like before the computer era, so I kept these colors.

The marker of the eel was interesting because the initial drawing worked poorly as tracking image. Then trying to break it up into pixels gave little effect but after running several sets of lines across, it stopped working all together.


Eventually, I arrived at a tracking image which technically worked really well, while keeping the idea of an eel which is swimming somewhere underneath a layer of structural mesh.

The purple squares in the marker for the canoe (shown bellow)represent the turbulent nature of the flow, which creates bubbles.Their square shape and lots of white space in between helped them being recognised by the digital technology and was an instant success. The dimesions of the images with the eel in them correspond to the those of a tile in Queen Street.

Perhaps too many lines are picked up as noise by the iphone. On the other hand the criss-cross lines gave a sense of perspective with the eel swimming way down underneath the layers of mesh. This was a good development with regard of the river flowing underneeth the pavement, however I still had to make it work with AR.


The tracking images can add to the experience of the 3D objects and participate in the collective cultural message of the project

These photos were taken, while I was making sure that everything will works before taking it to Queen street.


CLICK TO PLAY!Click on any of the last three imagest to see a video of how my augmented reality project works in real life.


my media submission c

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