A few days ago I saw an installation at a design festival that used Spark AR to make a 2D illustrated house come to life with 3D animations. The result was pretty impressive, so I decided to give Spark AR a try to create some cool augmented reality camera effects!
I was surprised by how easy it was to get up and running with complex actions like face and target tracking. Target tracking is especially exciting, because it lets you trigger content or animations when the camera sees a certain target. In my first demo project, I used a target tracker to animate a poster on my bedroom wall. When a user loads the AR effect and points the camera at the poster, some 3D objects appear in space relative to the poster.
My goal for this project is to create a 3D scene that mirrors the 2D poster, but baby steps. For now, I created 3D elements for some of the text, and for part of the Golden Gate Bridge. I used Blender to create the bridge model and texture. My only 3D modeling experience is procedurally generating spheres and cylinders in a Computer Graphics class, so working on the bridge model was quite a learning process.
The image below is the poster target that the effect tracks. To try it out for yourself, you'll want to view this page on a computer, and grab your phone to scan the QR code. Once your phone's camera opens in Instagram, point it at the poster directly below the QR code on your computer screen. (Requires an Instagram account to access the Spark AR effect).
This is the intended result-- the text and part of the Golden Gate Bridge are 3D, and you can move the camera to see them from different angles.
