ART++ ☎️ 🎥 🎨

Augmented Reality application to show art in real-time in real-size.

Theme:

You can find more details about the pedestrian comfort theme in our FAQs, but in a nutshell, we’re looking for participants to create something that falls into one of the three categories of pedestrian comfort: play, safety and health.

• Play: Create something that helps people use our streets in a new ways and encourages community.
• Safety: Create something that helps increase pedestrian safety on Calgary’s streets.
• Health: Create something that helps encourage Calgarians to get outside and be active.

We had to use at least one dataset from the City of Calgary.

My contribution

I worked on determining in which communities our app is being used (the green text in the upper-right corner of the GIF). For this I used the Community Boundaries dataset from the City of Calgary to get the polygon coordinates of each community. Given a single geo-coordinate I was able to determine the exact community our app was being used in, using the Point Inclusion algorithm - code. The idea behind this was to record in which of the communities the people are the most active, as well as send data back to the City of Calgary, such as which art piece is the most favourite, where the art piece is located, etc...

Inspiration

The following are some of the problems the city is facing when choosing a new public art piece:

• Citizens do not have a voice
• Citizens engagement is limited
• Finished art usually does not fit in
• Time and money are not well spent

So we decided to create a solution that will make sure our city steps it's game up with public art.

What it does

The following are some of the benefits our solution introduces:

• Encourages citizens to explore their city
• Everyone can be heard and participate in choosing an art piece in their community
• Shows the project before it is built, which allows the city to plan ahead without huge costs

How we built it

• Used C# programming language
• Used Unity along side with ARCore
• Used Community Boundaries dataset
• Used Point Inclusion algorithm

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was mostly a learning experience for most members of the group to expose them to Augmented Reality technologies, as well as data processing and data visualization. ART++ is fully functional, and we hope to squish bugs, add features, and improve its performance in the future.

What we learned

• Augmented Reality technologies
• Computational geometry algorithms
• Data processing
• Data visualization

What's next for ART++

• Add new features
  • Donations
  • Extend to not just art, also include buildings, parks, bridges, etc...
• Create a portal to upload art models