Link to Project Page: https://jacobjablon.github.io/480-jnj-final/
Through the photographic and optical innovations of companies such as Kodak, Xerox, and Bausch + Lomb, Rochester, the World’s Imaging Center has been able to flourish into a city that welcomes technological innovation in the most recent years. What our project entails is giving users the ability to step into an interactive walk story that highlights the success and shortcomings of the “Big Three” in Rochester, NY: Kodak, Xerox Corporation, and Bausch and Lomb. While these companies will be highlighted, the user will also start to understand how much they impacted the community when it came to new discoveries that would later lead individuals to pursue innovation in their own means. Using location-based AR.js and implementing 3D models, the user will be able to see different animated scenes at certain points in the city. This is so that the user will become familiarized with not only the history, but the layout that surrounds these legacy buildings and how much they have changed over the years.
We set up this project where the user will go to eight different points of interest (POIs), that hold significant information regarding Rochester’s innovative history. The first stop will start at Xerox Tower, now known as Innovation Square, a university apartment complex. The second location will be Legacy Tower, where Bausch + Lomb used to be. The third will be on the bridge, where in the far distance you will be able to see Kodak Tower. The fourth will transition into a midpoint stop at the Miller Quad by the University of Rochester. The fifth stop will be at Envative, a small software development company that gained influence in the developing innovative city. The sixth stop is another midpoint which will be at the ROCO site, and the final one will be at the Martin Luther King Jr. Park, where we will end the interactive walk and story, as the user has now been able to view the story through the eyes of an observer and a learner.
Looking back on this project, we faced a lot of challenges and successes, which ultimately lead us to having a fun time creating our project. The challenges we mainly faced were with location-based AR.js, due to the complexity it brings when making sure our assets are being correctly loaded into our scenes at the coordinates we need them to be at. When it came to implementing our assets, we were able to use the AFRAME Inspector, which helped us a lot with figuring out the way our animations were going to run. We were able to get a generalized sense of how we wanted assets to translate, rotate, and scale. A success that we had was with creating a story and implementing an AI voice reader, and seeing the tone and speed at which it read our script
A major challenge that we experienced was with how the assets looked from our laptop screens, and transitioning them to our phones. Due to the world coordinates and the GPS’ installed on our phones, what we saw would be different than how the laptop would play our scene, so some objects looked smaller than others, and were spawned at different locations based on our coordinates. We were successful in creating the html for our project, and implementing a fully developed map that would track where the user is going, and once at the location can play the scene. We also were successful with creating UI scenes for every single point. One last success that should be mentioned was us being able to go into the city and scoping out the locations we believed to be relevant, along with implementing vtt files for transcripts, which helped us when running certain animations.
We branched out to different resources, heavily using GSAP when timing animations and how they can ease in and out, and with ElevenLabs for AI voice implementation. Overall this project had a lot of highs and lows and we are proud to present RochestAR: Path of Perseverance.
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