Character Animation in AR: Character Animation in AR: a mobile application development study
Sukanya Bhattacharjee, Parag Chaudhuri
TL;DR
The paper addresses digital preservation of cultural heritage using mobile AR to recreate scenes from Hampi's Virupaksha Bazaar for visitors. It contributes a comparative AR framework evaluation (Vuforia vs ARCore) and a complete AR pipeline built on ARCore+Unity, complemented by Blender assets. It then details two components: an interactive authoring tool for placing, relocating, scaling, and saving animated character prefabs anchored to detected planes, and a user-view app with a GPS-based navigation layer to guide users to augmentation locations and re-anchor content in situ. The results, demonstrated on a Pixel 2, show a practical, scalable workflow for heritage visualization with potential educational and outreach applications, contingent on available 3D assets.
Abstract
Digital preservation of the cultural heritages is one of the major applications of various computer graphics and vision algorithms. The advancement in the AR/VR technologies is giving the cultural heritage preservation an interesting spin due to its immense visualization ability. The use of these technologies to digitally recreate heritage sites and art is becoming a popular trend. A project, called Indian Digital Heritage (IDH), for recreating the heritage site of Hampi, Karnataka during Vijaynagara empire ($1336$ - $1646$ CE) has been initiated by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) few years back. Immense work on surveying the site, collecting geographical and historic information about the life in Hampi, creating 3D models for buildings and people of Hampi and many other related tasks has been undertaken by various participants of this project. A major part of this project is to make tourists visiting Hampi visualize the life of people in ancient Hampi through any handy device. With such a requirement, the mobile AR based platform becomes a natural choice for developing any application for this purpose. We contributed to the project by developing an AR based mobile application to recreate a scene from Virupaksha Bazaar of Hampi with two components - author scene with augmented virtual contents at any scale, and visualize the same scene by reaching the physical location of augmentation. We develop an interactive application for the purpose of digitally recreating ancient Hampi. Though the focus of this work is not creating any static or dynamic content from scratch, it shows an interesting application of the content created in a real world scenario.