How Urbica built an AR app of St. Peterburg with the Maps SDK for Unity
By: Brynne Henn
Our friends at Urbica, an urban data analysis and visualization company from Moscow, always blow us away with how they visualize the world around them. They’ve used our tools to explore everything from 3D agglomerations to urban noise mapping. So when we saw their latest creation, AReal, we had to hear more.
Let’s start at the beginning — what is AReal?
AReal is an iOS augmented reality app that shows a map of Saint Petersburg, and it’s landmarks in 3D. There are seven star pins on the map, which mark the locations of Saint Petersburg’s architectural masterpieces. After tapping on a pin, explore the 3D landmarks in augmented reality, play, spin, and scale them. We think it is a fun way to experiment with the environment, placing virtual architecture in real surroundings.
Why did you decide to build this? What was the challenge?
At Urbica, we design and create a good deal of maps and geospatial visualizations, but all of them were flat web maps. At the beginning of 2018 we asked ourselves, why not attempt making a 3D map in augmented reality? After attending Locate, we heard many inspiring talks on maps in augmented reality and location-based AR in general, and as geo enthusiasts, we were challenged to keep up and stay at the forefront.
Take us under the hood — how did you build this?
To build the app, we used Unity and Maps SDK for Unity by Mapbox. First, we created a map style using Mapbox Studio with the initial design, choosing colors and the basic look of the map. Then, we’ve used Maps SDK for Unity to plug the geospatial data and the map style into the 3D environment. Lastly, we made the buildings volumetric and fine-tuned the style inside the Unity tools.
This is your first AR project — do you have anything else planned?
AReal was a daring experiment to explore the possibilities of augmented reality. We might proceed in this field: for example, the idea of visualizing geospatial data in AR excites us. Recently, we’ve even built a prototype using data from our agglomerations.org project:
Apart from AR, we are mostly doing data analysis and visualizations of urban data. We are working on tools which help cities understand their environment better.
Ready to start building your own AR application? Explore any of our Unity, Scenekit, or React Native AR SDKs to find out how.
AReal — St. Petersburg … in 3D was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.