In Collaboration With Rutgers University Inn and Conference Center
Project Date: Fall 2019
Project Summary
This game uses Augmented Reality technology and physical markers to bring attention to and teach people about features on the trail behind the Rutgers University Inn. Using the mobile app, users can scan the physical markers to answer trivia questions and learn about the wildlife and history of the trail. Great care was taken to: map out the historic trail, highlight rare plant life, create and plant non-invasive signposts. The signs naturally act as waypoints, guiding you through the trail and showing you the borders of the play area. We thought that having a fun new way to learn about the plants on the trail using AR technology would be a driving force for players to continuously to explore and learn. Having to be at the location to play the game was a decision made to drive traffic to the Inn and its Trail.
My involvement
This was my first time starting up a project from the concepts and prototyping stage. We had a nebulous goal of bringing awareness to the recently restored historic trail. Through a lot of brainstorming and playing with different technologies; we settled on using the Unity and Vuforia engines for AR recognition. My main tasks were assembling the team together to work on this project. I outlined goals and requirements as specified from our clients. I worked closely with our stakeholders to explain our research and development during the early prototyping phases. I was in charge of keeping the clients up to date with our weekly progress as well as relaying the wants and needs expressed in working meetings to our development team. As our clients were more milestone-oriented, this allowed the development team time to work on their craft while I took care of the outward-facing, time-consuming parts of working with the clients and making sure they were happy and listened to. I thoroughly enjoyed working and bouncing ideas for the storyboards, flow and story for the game as well.
One of our clients also acted as the “plant expert” and had a team of ecology students working to draw plants, verify plant locations and information and guide our design choices. All in all, I made sure things were running smoothly, all the information was getting passed around properly, and deadlines for open houses were realistic and attainable. This was tracked with different Kanban boards, development boards, Excel spreadsheets, and with our project management tool: Asana. I also worked as QA for the images we used for the AR recognition, I ended up editing some images to make sure the engine could use them. I was also in charge of research, development, and prototyping all of our physical signposts. I communicated updates to the stakeholders for their open houses and arranged events around the app so we could get students to playtest the app for us. I also managed the student workers that were working on this project with us. All of the wildlife and plantlife art was done by the stakeholder’s student workers. I also managed their schedule and art delivery schedule for the team.
A lot of thought and care was put into the physical components of the project since, without them, the game would not function. Since the trail was outside, the physical sign markers needed to be resilient to the elements. I worked with our makerspace and subject matter experts to chose a material that was affordable but resilient to the outside. We tested materials from different types of stones to metal to wood. Our prototypes went from laser printing a design on metal, to laser cutting stone (not pictured), to finally UV printing treated cedar wood with our color design. Keep in mind, I did not have any experience using this machinery, so I spent time learning these machines, researching our options, speaking to craftsmen for advice, researching what national parks do for their trail signs, to make this happen. After a lot of back and forth with our stakeholders, and after a lot of iterating and fine-tuning, we settled on the treated slabs of cedarwood. Cedarwood is resilient against rot. I also found that sealing it with a polyacrylic spray protected the panel from everything, including water! Not only did the UV printer protect the design against the sun, but it also could be printed in our own makerspace at the rate of 10 minutes per sign. The print was also high detail, which is critical in making sure the phones could be picked up by the app and functional. The signposts that go in the ground were also another factor. After all, we had a limited budget. I not only had to weigh the budget costs with our stakeholders for the development of the game but for the physical markers as well. With me learning a lot of woodworking skills and all of the machines in the woodshop/metal shop, I was able to cut costs down by buying raw materials in bulk and then mass producing and treating all the wood in house. I got the process down to a science at the end of it and now how a full set of woodworking skills, metal skills and UV printing skills to show for it.
Managing this project. Below are screens of assets management, project management I was responsible for upkeeping and making sure all the pieces of development were moving properly. I made sure to track issues, assets from our student workers and my own progress for the physical parts of the project. I also have an email I sent to keep track of some tasks.
Project Management using Github.
Final thoughts
This was an extremely fun project. I got to learn so many neat skills while working on this project and I loved working closely with all members of the team. This was a huge undertaking for our department and the final product couldn’t have been achieved if we could not work so well together. There were times where I was stretched a bit thin but as a team, we were able to work together to fill in the gaps. With all of the moving pieces happening, between the physical parts of the project, managing student worker schedules, needing to prototype and test out materials for signposts, keeping the stakeholders up to date, and keeping the parts of the team up to date with everything, I’m glad we got to take a breather once this goal was achieved. The stakeholders were happy and we’re looking to add more content and updates to the app in the future. I also got to push my time management skills to the test with all of these moving pieces on the project. Again, great thanks to the team for pulling this all together.
