This was my final major project for university, its augmented reality educational books, designed on the idea of a traditional pop-up book. My original idea was to create a book from scratch focusing on the AR elements and for the printed media to just be a base for it. Though I want to create a project that enhanced the printed book with AR and still be able to use the book on its own, something that is still very tactical I didn’t want the technology to completely overtake the printed media.

So came the idea of instead of creating a book that uses AR to add functionality to pre-existing books. So came the name, ‘New Life’ as in giving new life to older books and doing so in a ‘New Reality’. Using this method any book in the world could be enhanced in the same way without being physically altered, which was a really interesting point for me. This project is just a demo of what could be created with an application custom-built for this purpose, I built this using Snap Chat and their lens studio tools. This came with many limitations the main one being the allowed asset size for each filter. I had to spend time refining and compressing the models and textures to fit them into the project, this is also why for the Apollo to the moon book there had to be two filters created as there was no way I could compress the more complex models any further. Snap Chat limits this for performance and download size but as only one filter is shown at a time this wouldn’t affect performance, it's just that the application isn’t built for this but at the time of creation there really is not any alternatives to use that was available to me.

You can check out a full run-through of each book below.