Making intuitive mobile apps using AR showcased with slot racing!
User experience for mobile games is crucial, since every resource for game programmers and game designers on the mobile platform is limited. With this project it is my challenge (and my masters thesis) to create an intuitive mobile app and challenging the capabilities of the newest AR technologies in a simple gaming concept which is slot racing. The concept is the following: Imagine picking up your phone like a toy car and driving through the air on an fictitious track. And now imagine that track actually comes to live! Using the newest AR technology I want to try to realize that playful approach on track building.
The development of new AR technologies is in a constant flux. The latest installments for the mobile market are Google’s ARCore and Apple’s ARKit. The Unity plugin “AR Foundation” is the intersection between the both of them and will be used in this work in a practical manner. By recording the points the mobile device travels in the space, simplifying the data structure using a splines and extruding the mesh along a spline, the street track is created virtually. After creating tracks, the user can race on them similarly to slot car racing games and share them with others via a cloud server.