Project: An Augmented Reality (AR) Robot for the Science Festival
At the international Science Festival of the Otago University in Dunedin a cute little robot was chosen as a mascot and BurningFish Productions was asked to build the model, animate it and work with "Peekavu" Ltd to bring it to life.
The Robot and its Game
The idea was to provide some fun rocket science (mainly) to the young audience of the Science Festival. The viewer was going to be able to interact with the robot, who was wearing a jetpack and was waiting for instructions on a chunk of Earth floating in space.
Controlling the Robot
When the robot was activated in AR, the viewer was able to interact with a bunch of controls, set the thrust duration and thrust power of the jetpack and, most importantly, hit the launch button to try to shoot it to the moon. Depending on the choices made the robot would either fall short, overshoot or actually land on the moon. There it would send out an invite to the festival and activate the moon as a button. When touched, the viewer would be taken to the official Science festival website.
Augmented Reality for You
This is the actual target image provided on the official Festival poster. If you download the Peekavu App (see below) you can have the robot experience yourself. Just point the phone/tablet at the image on the right (or even better, print it out) and have a go at shooting the robot to the moon.
Peekavu
The Peekavu App can be downloaded for free from either the Apple Appstore or the Google Playstore onto mobile devices. Peekavu offers also many other experiences that are available with the same App or you can even commission your own. Check it out on their website.