Augmented Reality – Sohum's VR Blog

Character Biography

The future is a place ahead of time with incredibly advanced technology, hoverboards and a dystopia where everything is digital. The Spark AR character is a representation of a person from this same time who is half human, half robot, runs on battery and lives in Cybertron, a utopia set in the year 3000.
The thought process behind my character was fairly simple. The virtual world I always imagined to build was a futuristic one similar to the movie Tomorrowland. It was clear to me that the character needed to have a halo and an LED display in front of it’s eyes. I found an image on Google and thought it was the perfect depiction of the character I had in mind. It finally ended up having a halo on top of its head, a display lens over its eyes, a charging port on its forehead as it was part android and I added a blue reflecting filter over the face since I imagined the natural light in the world to be blue as if mabye everyone lived in a dome. I dont know what it was about the colour blue but it gave everything a futuristic effect.
The character is an android and has a genetically modified face and body and therefore is not represented by my physical self. The character is not me, the design is meant to be one of the more privileged people living in Cybertron who has the Halo on their head. The Halo is not an easy object to acquire in Cybertron, it requires extreme display of skill and sacrifice to be rewarded to someone who receives it personally from the Overlord. I call these people the Watchers. Since the image of the way the Overlord looked, was not clear in my mind, I designed the next powerful person using the software, a Watcher.

Introduction

We were introduced to yet another software called Spark AR by Meta and were asked to make an artifact on it. The objective of this artifact was to make a realistic Snapchat-like filter. I can’t say getting introduced to new softwares every week was fun, but by now I was used to it. Seeing how we had only 3 weeks to finish the filter, it didn’t seem like enough time but if we had requested to remove this artifact like we had done for projection mapping, I feel like the teachers would have failed us entirely as a batch. We had a single session on Spark AR and Pierre showed us how to create a face tracker and helped us add glasses and a phone outline to the display to make it look more believable. That class gave a nice understanding and basics of how the software worked.

Using the Spark AR library present, I experimented with multiple objects and saw multiple youtube videos on how to add them to my image. I found this very useful youtuber called DJS CREATES and used many of his videos to complete my filter.

https://sparkar.facebook.com/ar-studio/

As soon as we were introduced to it, the first thing that crossed my mind was to create a filter as closely identical as possible to a Valorant character, which is a game I have spent half my life playing and still surprisingly am not very good at, and then realised that no amount of Youtube videos in such a short amount of time would enable me to make such a complex filter. I then decided to make a futuristic looking character after taking inspiration from an NFT project I found online and tried to replicate it as it seemed the closest to what my character in my virtual world would look like. I created the holo glasses and a charging port on the head using Adobe Illustrator and imported it as a material on Spark. I also used the Spark AR library and downloaded a Halo and added a glowing effect on the face.

Character Biography

Introduction

Moodboard

Final Look