Our 3D model of London sample is often used for interesting experiments. Oliver Morris has posted a video of a 3D London tile in AR and we wanted to see whether we could simulate alignment of a physical representation of a city. In this second video Oliver used our free 3D sample London model with high quality 3D print of the same area produced for us by Hobs 3D and overlaid them in AR using FME.

‘’We really love to see our 3D data used in this way,’’ said Michal Konicek from AccuCities. “It’s great to see that a 3D print can be used as a marker in AR and these can be displayed . And I can see many possibilities with dropping in future development traffic or any other data we may want to overlay. I would like to encourage all 3D artists working with Augmented and Virtual reality solutions to take advantage of our free 3D city samples to create and innovate.”

3D Model in Augmented Reality projects

Last year at SCAPEHACK 2019 organised by Scape Technologies, AR developers Alberto Taiuti and Danilo Pasquariello employed our 3D model of London to create a simulated area of the location in webVR in which they were able to dynamically add virtual content at runtime. On that occasion, their project rightly won the Community Vote Award. Read more here.

This time we wanted to see whether using 3D printed model as a physical marker could work with tools that are already on a market.

“AccuCities sent me a 3D printed London model – had a play at comparing it to their SketchUp model using SafeSoftware’s FME AR app, “said Oliver in his LinkedIn post. “Nice to be able to see them side by side… The 3D model isn’t needed to activate the AR, I was playing around with comparing how accurately the AR model compares to an actual scale model. Turns out even with average light conditions the iPad and FME AR app did a very good job at most angles. With the new LiDAR functionality of the new iPad I expect it to be even better. Next step is to work with some georefenced content and try to use the AR content in real space. For anybody interested in experiments like this, Safe Software have just released a blog about the AR toolkit they have to provide some more ideas as to what is possible, follow this link to learn more.”

AccuCities will continue our support for experiments and proof-of-concept projects in the field of location based AR / VR  and XR with our free 3D city model samples and when suitable with other resources such as extended samples or even 3D prints. Do you have a project in mind? Get in Touch here.