The Memory of Childhood - Postmortem

Successes (What went right)

Through this project, we developed a decent amount of knowledge of working with Vuforia AR specifically, and had the chance to get a sneak peek into the process of ios App development. While each of our group members worked on different parts of the project, we were able to efficiently and transparently communicate success and problems throughout the project, thus providing valuable insights and knowledge of the entire project from beginning to end to every group member.

We got to experiment with 3D modeling tools from multiple platforms such as blender on PC and nomad sculpt on Ipad, and were able to transfer models between different softwares to achieve the desired final results. Along the way, we faced many challenges such as using UV unwrap and creating our own material for the 3D models we created. Our team worked together on transforming 2D ideas into 3D interactive, animated objects and we learned so much new skills along the way.  

In Unity, we were able to accurately locate the AR objects at the correct size and location. Despite struggling a little bit, we were able to add animation to 3D objects and interaction to our game such as opening the blind box. We conquered lots of bugs along the way and were able to successfully and accurately run our project on the 2D assets we created.

At the end, we successfully projected multiple types of objects(animated and interactive 3D models, videos and text) onto our AR markers. I think the some of the biggest success of our project are:

• Originality
• Team work
• Technical solutions
• New skills
• The passion of our group members to continue working on this project in the future.

Failures (What went wrong)

There were so many things that did not go as planned during our development stage. At the very beginning, we struggled to grapple the artistic style of our project and it looked inconsistent for a long time. We also had trouble with 3D modelling and coloring it, as we discovered half way that Unity does not accept glTF files and we will need to manually create individual materials for each of the models created. Animating the 3D model also gave us a lot of headaches as we did not set the location correctly and the models kept flashing from one location to another. 

The funniest problem we encountered was actually when we were first trying to build the project into ios App and downloading Xcode, since Xcode is extremely large, we all had to delete and transfer a huge amount of files from our computer in order to download it.We were all streaming our progress of struggling to delete and transfer project on the phone together, and that was such an unforgettably hilarious scene that happened. I’m so glad that as a team, we successfully did so much problem solving along this journey and made it work.

Lessons Learned (What did you learn from your failures or how did you overcome them)

One thing that we learned in this project is to carefully plan each step ahead and always leave extra time for every step in between. More importantly, for inexperienced groups like us, always try to help each other even if it’s not your duty because while working with a group project like this, one person’s problem could hinder the whole project. During our project, whenever there’s any problem pop up, we were always transparent and vocal about it, and everyone always tried their best to offer help and ideas. This positive working environment really encouraged us all, who are not entirely sure what AR is at the beginning, to conquer so many challenges that we couldn’t even think of at the beginning. 

Future Development (If you were to continue working on this game how would you improve it)

In the future, we would really want to polish our project and make it into an actual project. In order to achieve this goal, we’ll need to create better, cohesive, and more attractive models along with animations. We will need to make adjustments to the design elements to make everything work well together. Ideally, we would like to create a rarity system and create more collectible cards and more collections, so that it’s not limited to the childhood memory of Chinese people, but possibly people from different countries. Not only do we want to add more collections of cards, but also more languages so that it opens to a wider range of audiences.