The AR Notebook project started early summer 2018 when I was preparing our Interrail trip with two friends of mine and I was doing research on Augmented Reality in order to have an idea of its potential applications.
The Augmented Reality technology gave me many ideas, some easier to follow through and develop than others but all very exciting so I decided to find out more and learn.
As the beginning of the trip approached, I thought I would like to keep a travel diary. But why not give it a special touch using Augmented Reality ? That is how the project began.
The objective of this project was to give more than what a simple journal could give, I aimed at adding an extra dimension, having a diary full of surprises all of them not apparent at first sight !

To create this app I used Unity, a cross platform game Engine. I chose this platform because I already knew how to handle it from previous experience. Unity supports Augmented Reality projects, evolves constantly and has a great community that supports it.
Then I needed to choose between ARCore and Vuforia. Both of them have pros and cons but I chose Vuforia because it would suit what I intended to do and it was compatible with both IOS and Android devices.
Once I had finalised the paper travel diary, I took pictures of it, integrated them to Unity using Vuforia and added the 3D content. Most of the 3D content comes from Google Poly but I had to create some using Blender. The animations were created by C# script.

Here is a video showing how I created my AR notebook app and the result !

This project could evolve in two different ways :

• Here it is an app customized for my travel diary but it would be interesting to develop an app that would enable any user to customize their own diaries !
• This alternative way of reading and discovering books could be applied to children books or educational material - imagine how education could benefit from this !