By: Adam Debreczeni
My bike ride in AR. (Unity + ARKit + Mapbox + Strava) https://t.co/g2uVwVlM3h
— @heyadam
When we saw this combination of the Maps Unity SDK, Strava, and ARKit our team was amazed. We wanted to know more about the demo, so we’re excited to share Adam’s behind the scenes look at how he built it.
What’s the trail we’re viewing in this demo?
I recorded my bicycle ride in the Marin Headlands on Strava. Using the Maps Unity SDK, I grabbed the GPS trace of that bicycle ride and put the line on top of a 3D mesh of the Marin Headlands. Then I let ARKit control the scene and rendered the result to a video.
Have you made maps before?
I’ve been exploring Mapbox for a long time now. Its powerful API’s means you can use the map data in creative ways. For a previous project, I wanted to visualize Strava data on a map with more controls and Mapbox was the only toolkit that let me get the result I wanted. So, I was already familiar with the API’s before the Unity Maps SDK came out.
When I saw a tweet announcing the Unity SDK, I thought, “this will be perfect for VR!” I initially built out a few VR demos, but I didn’t do a good job of recording them. When ARKit came out, I wanted to play around with it as I finally had an AR-capable device at home. I was able to pull my VR experiment and adapted it to AR — in under an hour!
What were the advantages of using the Maps Unity SDK?
Accessible 3D terrain, building, and road data will be instrumental for designing interfaces for autonomous vehicles. No other SDK I’ve played with comes close.
You’re turning your camera into the interface to interact with a visualization. Where do you see exciting opportunities for these types of interactions?
It’s close to impossible to predict where people will take this technology — or on a higher-level — how it will impact how we design. That’s the exciting part!
However, I’ll speculate that we’ll see explorations in how interfaces work in 3D and interact with the environment around us. This is a much bigger change in computing than from the keyboard and mouse to multi-touch in smartphones. The world around us will very soon become a digital canvas.
Where do you expect to see the first break-through AR use cases in the next year?
In this current generation of mobile AR, my guess is it’ll be exploring the world around you and entertainment. When consumer friendly AR-headsets come around, I think it’ll be as transformative as when the first personal computer or mobile smartphone came out.
AR headsets might slowly eat road signs, watches, computer displays, TV screens, dashboards in cars, billboards. Why invest in a static object with paint and ink, when you can have a dynamic one which you cheaply update and make responsive to each person? This might seem far out, but imagine telling someone in 2005 how people in 2015 get around (Uber / Lyft), communicate (face filters in Snap), take photos (iPhone’s camera shooting 4K). The technology breakthrough is always a toy first.
Adam Debreczeni (@heyadam) | Twitter
Bike ride with ARKit: How I built it was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.