A location based experience that allows you to peek into a possible future of my hometown Graz.
User can unlock 360° videos by visiting given locations all over town. Those videos are based on panoramic videos that were captured using an Insta360 Pro 2. These videos were then enhanced with CG content to show a possible future interpretation of those spaces.
This was all a brainchild of Georg Hartwieg (aka. The Quiet Now). The renderings were done by shotshotshot. General design and the website by the lovely Onimo Studios with whom I closely collaborated on the app design. My contribution was to implement the Android and iOS Apps.
So I want to briefly talk about some implementation highlights I did on this project:
- Most content is dynamically loaded when demanded by the user. This is done via Unity Adressables (not to be confused with Addressable Assets). There is a staggered loading scheme that loads content based on what the users are most likely to interact with first.
- To achieve more immersion the 360° videos are aligned with the real world. To achieve this I use the phones compass. That turned out much harder then expected because compasses are generally still pretty bad in mobile phones. On my personal phone the readings had a cone of confusion of about 30°. So some kind of average was needed to combat the noise. This led me to the discovery of directional statistics to handle values that are circular and not linear.
- I used the Mapbox Unity package to display a map showing both the player as well as the locations of the videos. I can highly recommend this tool. It allowed our designers to fully customize the look of the map to fit the look of the app.
- Some sounds are locatable (i.e. have a discernible 3D location) that I hand animated to match the objects on screen.
- There are various kinds of meta content than can be discovered in each scene. This includes external websites that open in the app (thank you, UniWebView), as well as WatchDogs styles info overlays and video in video.
Working on this project was great fun for me and I’m happy how it turned out. There was obviously a lot of effort put into the future predictions Dense sound scapes combined with haunting music create a unique atmosphere.
You can find out more about the project here: https://dystoptimal.com/
as well as download the apps
