Skylanders AR project Unity
Introduction
Skylanders has always been a big source of inspiration for me, both on design and the used technology.
Skylanders Battlecast is a Skylanders spin-off mobile card battle game that takes physical cards and brings them to life. Players transport their characters into the game using the camera on their mobile device. Once the card is activated, the character can jump right into battle or participate in a minigame.
(For more information about Skylanders and what it is exactly you can have a look at one of my other projects; Skylanders Website with Arduino).
One day, I found my old Skylanders Battlecast cards again, and felt a little sad realizing Skylanders Battlecast was gone and unavailable to play.
Although, I was interested in the AR technology they used for the game.
I had this crazy idea of making the Skylanders Battlecast cards coming to life again
As I was completely new into Unity (with little experience before).
I didn’t even know if it was possible to use AR technology within Unity.
And so, as a Software Developer in training, I wanted to try to make the Skylanders Battlecast cards AR available so that these cards could have a new value again.
Cube to character
At first I started to let the app recognize the card. This was possible due to Vuforia. After the app recognized the card it was now able to let something float above the card. I just started with a simple cube.
After trying if it worked with the cube, I was now ready to replace the cube with actual characters, the Skylanders. I found some 3d models online and used them for my project.
I also needed to make sure multiple cards could be scanned at once. In the end this worked out.
Menu Screen
Now that the Skylanders were able to be displayed as soon as the card got recognized by the app through the camera I thought it would be nice to make a little menu screen.
A challenging part was to make the volume slider in the Options tab. The hard part was letting the slider being able to save it's current state, so that the setting will be saved for in the future. I was able to make this.
Animations
After making the menu screen, I finally found out that the Skylander models had animations, so I connected the animations with the Skylanders and now when their cards got scanned it didn't look like they were frozen anymore. I also made a Back button so I was able to go back to the menu screen.
The result
I am really happy with how it turned out, and I am also glad that I can use my Skylanders Battlecast cards again.
