Building A Simple Augmented Reality Card Game App Using Unity & Vuforia
I built a very simple AR App that was initially intended to convert regular playing cards into Tarot Cards (…but if you watch the video below… I got sort of carried away and started messing around)
I made this with Unity and a service called Vuforia which is a software development kit for mobile devices that makes it super easy to create augmented reality applications.
As per the image below, Vuforia has a system set up such that once you register an account with them, you can upload “target” images which you then import into Unity. You do need to make sure the image quality is good though (Below you see a few where I used poor resolution (but free!) stock images that resulted in only 3 or even 0(!) stars in image quality)
You next need to configure Unity to work with Vuforia so you can add an ARCamera (that replaces the default Camera). After that, once you download the database from Vuforia and export it into Unity, you can then add these image targets as new objects. The device camera will now automatically detect the images if they come into view.
You can then easily stick new object on to the target images as a “child” object. These could be other images , animated video clips or even 3d models and Unity will automatically overlay these on top of the target image.
I briefly describe how I built the app in this video.
I can’t take too much credit as I used the basic steps outlined on this video on Playful Tech’s Youtube channel to build the app along with some free images and 3d models I scoured from the internet. I’ve not yet figured out how to do it yet but there should be an easy way to make the animated models interactive somehow. Maybe something for the next update of the app.
The same principle can be applied for a whole range of applications such as animated posters , animated business cards or even more elaborate real life treasure hunt activities.
For anyone interested, I’ve parked the entire project in my Github page here:-
BONUS MATERIAL !
Anyway, before I end the article, for any aspiring cartomancers out there, I leave you with a few articles I came across while reading up on tarot decks.
This first link explains the Celtic Cross method for Tarot Reading that astute viewers will have noticed me using in the demo video.
The link is about how you can actually map the tarot deck onto regular playing cards (In my app, I “cheated” as I included some Major Arcana cards which don’t exist in regular playing cards)
This last article is one that sadly debunks the romantic idea that modern day playing cards originate from tarot deck.
