LOGAN BODENHAMER
Lindsborg Past And Present
Role: Programmer/Researcher
Software: Unity
Languages: C#
Download: Was available on iOS App Store and Google Play during 2019
Lindsborg Past and Present was an app I developed for the 150th anniversary of Lindsborg, KS while I was a junior in High School. The app allowed you to walk through the business district on Main St. and hold your phone up to the signs for the different buildings to view historical information about each location. It was available on Google Play and the iOS App Store through 2019. Prior to the development of Lindsborg Past and Present, I applied for and was awarded the Lindsborg Arts Council grant for this project.
I chose to use the Vuforia plugin for Unity3D because of its image target system. To use image targets, you upload the image you want the app to search for into Vuforia's developer portal, then it will find points on the image to track and adds those to a package for you to install into Unity. This was perfect for what I was trying to accomplish, but there were some challenges. Images that only have a few points of contrast can't be tracked reliably, so I had to choose each sign wisely and even had to retake some photos to make sure they were of good enough quality. I would then process each image in photoshop and isolate the important parts of the sign to emphasize the contrast as much as possible.
One signs I used that has been processed by Vuforia. The green points on the image are points of contrast the app would look for to find a match
Lindsborg Past and Present required a lot of research into the town's past. This was easily the most time-consuming part of the project because most buildings had very little information about them available online. I did eventually find a historic survey documenting the architectural history of each building, which helped fill out each location's profile, but it lacked more interesting personal facts about each site which had to be found through hours of sorting through old and obscure web pages.
Setting up each location in Unity was simple thanks to Vuforia. I made a UI for each location containing the information I had gathered from my research and attached them to the corresponding image target game objects. Each UI would remain disabled until Vuforia detected a match, and then it would enable the UI and stop searching for matches until that menu was closed.