CAPSTONE
Constructing Watershed UGA
the augmented reality app
The exit course for the New Media Institute's New Media Certificate is NMI Capstone. It is a class dedicated to showcasing students skills and progression through the New Media Certificate Program. Students are divided into teams of 5 and a real world client is delegated to them based on specific skills and interests. These clients can be anything from health companies to school clubs.
My team was assigned Watershed UGA: a stream restoration and protection initiative aimed at engaging the University of Georgia community in sustainability through watersheds. They raise awareness about environmental issues and community impact while promoting experiential learning, research, public service and outreach.
During a meeting with the Watershed UGA team, we learned about the Lake Herrick Restoration Project. Lake Herrick is a lake in Athens, Georgia formed as a result of a large watershed. It used to be used for recreational sports and research but was condemned due to pollution from the local community. The Lake Herrick project is multi-phased aimed at returning the lake back to a functional state to facilitate experiential learning, research, and recreation.
Overall, my team wanted to make our end product useful, educational, and interesting by utilizing our skills and knowledge of new technologies, coding, and innovative design. We decided to use Lake Herrick as a lesson and example of pollution and poor sustainability efforts and chose Augmented Reality as our engaging technological feature.
During this project, I took the lead on project and user research, the overall visual elements of both our brand and our deliverables, and the creation of our project trailer. I also collaborated with my teammate, Ellie, for the presentations for each checkpoint.
In October of 2017, Apple released their ARkit software; it provides the building blocks for coding augmented reality (AR) apps more easily by packaging code in easy-to-use snippets. We knew we could create something pretty cool for Watershed once we got our hands on this new technology, so we brainstormed to find a way to incorporate it into our application.
We created the Watershed UGA app. Our app featured an interactive augmented reality tab and informational pages on the Lake Herrick project, Watershed UGA, sustainability, and volunteer opportunities.
To start, we created large aerial view maps of the current status of the lake. These large maps would eventually be made into podiums and placed in various locations around the lake with information on sustainability, the project, and how to download our app. Next, we utilized Unity's 3D rendering software to create a 3D model of what future Lake Herrick will look like and implemented Apple's ARkit to render these images over the maps on the podiums.
Once the Watershed UGA app is downloaded, a user can click on the AR tab which opens up a camera view. When the camera is placed over the large aerial view maps on the podiums, the ARkit technology will superimpose our interactive 3D-rendered images. The user can move his or her phone around 360 degrees and view the 3D model from various angles as it is anchored in its plane and will not move.
Due to the intensity of the code and technology, 4 months of fall semester was not enough time to code an entire application. Another team took on the other half of our project the following semester and we are looking forward to seeing the final results.
Below are links to our final deliverables if you would like to check them out!
