Terra Sigil
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This is a new experiment about creating AR with full native control: only hand gestures, no “find a flat surface”, “tap to place” and so on. Just like if you wear AR glasses! And also without baked animations: rocks move in real-time, in depend on hand movements.
I intentionally didn’t put instructions in the experience: I want users to discover all the features themselves!Though I put instructions here and explain some interesting technical details:
- Move your hand to control the magic sigil.
2D hand position is used to tell the plane tracker where to track - Hold your hand still to place it
I check hand position and camera movement deltas. If they are smaller than a certain threshold, the plane tracker stops continuous tracking. It happens after a certain amount of time holding still: you can see green magic runes animation. - Remove your hand to activate
This is an important step: when a user removes their hand, I bake camera texture into rocks. Otherwise, we could see rocks with parts of the hand. - Show your hand again and move to control the rocks
Raycasting is used to find an intersection point between a ray from camera-to-hand and the floor. Rocks move in depending on this point position. - Hold still again to freeze them in the air.
The point position freezes, so a user can remove their hand, and rocks will stay flying in the air. - At any stage, you can wave your hand at the bottom of the screen to unfreeze rocks or deactivate the sigil.
All the rocks are actually a single mesh controlled by a custom shader: this technique allows to create as many rocks as I want and control all of them simultaneously.
- Move your hand to control the magic sigil.