Drawing With AR | State of Matterless #49
Welcome to 2023! We experiment with digital AR drawing in the material world, lock in new Inco designs, and imagine AR car sounds.
Drawing With AR
During his holiday break, Jason wanted to start working on what’s been on his mind for a while: an AR drawing app! As he describes,
“I used Unity and the Conjure Kit to first set up a hand tracker that recognizes pinches. This was relatively straightforward; I just calculated when the distance between my forefinger and the tip of my thumb was beneath a certain threshold. From there, I created a drawn line using an Auki “Entity” at the point where the pinch started, then added the built-in Unity line renderer onto the corresponding game object. I then captured the position of the hand pinch on each frame and added the point to the line.”
The tricky part was getting it to work in multiplayer AR. Still, eventually, Jason managed to broadcast the line data over the Hagall server and have it rendered in real time on another device.
Jason also added a “Draw” button to prevent accidental inputs and a “Clear” button to reset the scene. There are still some critical issues to fix, like handling multiple hands and devices, smoothing the lines, and improving the precision of the hand detection algorithm. But overall, this prototype has a wiiiide use case and we can’t wait to see all the cool things we can do with it!
A Blob No Mo
After months of experiments, which included leveraging AI art generation tools, the team has designed a new Inco type! What began as a literal blob has been molded into an AR creature that is more expressive and customizable than the terrestrial animal designs we had previously pursued.
Now that Merlin has partially locked in the design, Bob the Inco is in the rigging and animation phase. Once that’s done, the team will explore alternative skins and texture variations. Stay up to date on our socials to track the progress!
The Sound Of AR Propulsion
Dusko is starting his 2023 by conjuring the growls of the AR muscle car in Floorcraft: Arena. In contrast to the smooth, electric-sounding hovercar, we want the muscle car to convey pure aggression. In Dusko’s words:
I crafted a supercharged engine sound for our new ride! I started with the raw power of V10 and V12 dragster sounds, then added the thundering force of a Boeing 747 jet. To top it off, I mixed in the growling engines of a Ford Mustang and a beefed-up Audi R8 V8 with double the superchargers. This car is gonna roar like a beast on the road!
That’s our update! Try out Floorcraft: Arena from the App Store, then share a video of your gameplay with us on Discord.
— Kerwin, social media manager
