Science Now needed an easy to access Augmented Reality solution for the European Space Agency's outdoor exhibition of remote sensing. We shipped a WebAR application delivering 32 experiences in 4 weeks using PlayCanvas and 8thWall.
The Direction Earth/Space AR exhibition 'All eyes on Earth' shows how satellite observations are revolutionising different domains of life and presents our world from a space-based perspective.
The exhbition is located across multiple sites on the streets of central Lublin (European Youth Capital 2023) in Poland and runs for six months. The exhibition sites across the city all offer enhanced content via augmented reality (AR) on any smartphone by using the web browser
Dare to seek a new point of view
Direction Earth/Space is an initiative of the European Space Agency
Project Website:
https://www.directionearth.space
Promotional video: actual in-app experience with overlaid reticle
WebAR
Whilst arguably more difficult to develop, Web AR (Augmented Reality) does not have the barrier to use that we often see with native apps. Users don't need to install anything to use the experience; they merely need to launch the exhibition website.
With the majority of WebAR experiences, there is one QR Code per experience. With eight exhibition cubes featuring four codes on each, we needed to devise a solution for 32 experiences!
The leading WebAR platform 8thWall offers reliable and stable solution for the WebAR but the project did not meet their conditions for a non-commercial license. As their pricing is largely focused on corporates, think Coca-Cola, Nike et al, with large marketing budgets working on short campaigns, a six month exhibition across multiple sites looked like it would incur enormous licensing costs.
it was difficult to see how we could circumvent the project requiring multiple licenses as 8thWall's cloud editing solution didn't really offer the kinds of tooling we would need to create that. Luckily, increasing the developer license allowed us to access 8th Wall's solution externally.
Two exhbition cubes at night: Users launch the app using a QR Code, then scan across the photographs untl they activate an AR experience.
Short video promo of the exhibition launch
Dynamic Loading
With external access to 8thWall added, we started work on the web application. As each 8thWall license is tied to one url, the application neded to make use of url parameters to determine firstly which cube was being scanned and secondly which side of the cube.
We modularised the application, starting with the QR Codes and cascaded this through each type of experience for every cube.
The result was a fast-loading application built using PlayCanvas that would dynamically load the required assets for any exhibit starting with those required for the current face of the cube, and loading the sides in the background.
Customised Tracking
As the exhibits were all outside, lighting conditions could negatively impact the realibility of the augmented reality. For example, bright sunlight shining directly on some surfaces caused 8thWall to lose tracking and the overlays would drift, disappear or even strobe as the tracking was lost and found again.
Parts of the 8thWall solution are external JavaScript files so we self-hosted these in order to make changes to the tracking. To mitigate the flashing, we de-bounced the tracking loss code to check the interval since the last loss and re-find. If that was below an arbitrary duration, we wouldn't hide the overlay. After some real-world testing and tweaking, we resolved all of the tracking issues.
Outcomes
The entire app was developed, tested and production-ready in four weeks. Over the six months, there were 127,500 unique app users.
More information on the exhibiton outcomes is available at https://directionearth.space/en/summary-2023.
