M8 Competition Launch Event: Augmented Reality Interactions (3/3)
PART 3 OF 3: Vehicle Surface
When given an opportunity to design an AR experience for one of BMW’s luxurious motorcars I knew we had to feature the vehicle’s unique body. Inspired by the Volkswagen Arteon Augmented reality presentation where air trails are used to indicate dynamic movement, similar segmented planes would be used as indicative tools to showcase the M8. Our primary aim involved highlighting the surface complexity through the use of dynamic splines, however, technical limitations forced a tangent in our visual direction and demanded that we adapt. This often happens in design, especially in RnD - A iterative process that I would like to focus on in this blog.
After several discussions on the technology and features we wanted to highlight, we synthesized our ideas into 9 potential opportunities, featured below. Of these 9, we developed 3 AR experiences based on the uniqueness of modality, theme and motion. The iconic M8 engine was the first installation chosen, which included annotations and info about the engine and car. The wheel was second, with this AR experience orchestrating a fictional disassembly and reassembly of the vehicle wheel and spokes to illustrate the complexity of the design and showcase the brake caliper and the beauty of its engineering.
Model 1
Our third installation aimed to highlight the vehicles aerodynamic design and requested that we use another form of animation sets, unique to the techniques used in the first two installations. We prototyped a high moving splines indicative of a moving road and began by manipulating their displacement to follow to main contours of the vehicle. Subtle in nature, this implementation would be mapped over the physical vehicle further illustrated in the images below.
We achieved this effect by scaling meshes based on their origin points and constraining their displacement along the vehicles curves. We soon discovered that transferring the displacement effect to an appropriate format however, was impossible using conventional fbx animation baking. As an alternative, we explored an alembic animation export - a unique type of file format created Sony Pictures Imageworks for visual effects. While our initial transfer tests between blender, unity and unreal were successful; Vuforia and Android would limit our implementation in AR - forcing us to explore a different avenue.
Model 2
Our second approach involved using texture and UV space animations to achieve our original aim to outline the vehicles surface geometry through speed lines. Rather than having dynamic geometry which animates, we would control the visibility of the geometry using a dynamic mask - an animated texture with loop-able properties. The result of our experiments resulted in a sleeker and acutely resolved variation of our first concept, as seen illustrated below.
Our developments led to a promising animated proposal and would be used in promotional material prior to the M8 launch event. The concept, when tested within AR however, suffered from a new issue - instability. Due to the complexity of the model, our animated texture map would jump frames causing confusion and breaking the illusion of fluid wind lines. Back to the drawing board!
Model 3 - Celebrating the design
Building upon our last attempts, we outlined the limitations we discovered and planned a new approach. Rather than showcase the surface geometry of the vehicle though airflow lines, we proposed a transitional wireframe effect that would encompass the vehicle as seen below. In reality, an easier and perhaps more engaging effect would be to create a series of alternating panels - invoking a wireframe effect within the negative space. Our approach involved extracting said panels from a digital asset and offsetting the scale value of each instance in proximity to a defined start and end point - a snapshot of this point in our process can be viewed below.
The Chosen Design - Previz rendering
Once a preliminary concept was developed and tested in AR, we created an animated model to visualise the outcome. A similar transitional emissive shader was used during this animation but was absent for the final AR installation due to our findings with earlier prototypes.
Activation Images
Establishing our 3D assets, in reality, required anchor points and unique identifiers for each model to ascribe to - we achieved this by using JS Placement, a procedural pattern creation tool commonly used to create sci-fi height maps. Each image was assigned to a model and scaled in virtual space using Unity; a breakdown of this process for the M8 wheel can be found in our
Our team explored the boundaries of what we were capable of developing in AR with our given tools and have set the stage for future developments by documenting our workflows and practices. We hope to further the interest in this field by developing new installations and exploring increasingly complex applications of this developing technology - both individually and with our partners.
Thanks for reading,
Epifanio Pereira
Junior Design Associate
