Nippon XPerience

Inspiration

Due to the pandemic, our family was not able to go to Japan this year. One of our most favorite things in the summer has been the festivals and especially the dance at the end. We first wanted to allow other people to see what Japanese summer festivals were like but then decided to expand it so that people can learn about the other beautiful seasons as well.

What it does

Through AR, our project allows users to get a taste of Japan in all four seasons. In the Springtime, Cherry Blossom trees sprout everywhere, painting the area a light pink. In the summer, many festivals occur and in most, people do the "Bon Dance" around a "Yagura". In the fall, bold hues of red surround historic temples and shrines. In the cold winter, hot springs are a go-to, especially if you can enjoy nature, like Mount Fuji, along with it.

How we built it

The whole program was coded in Java through JGrasp. For the spring section, we used sketchup to find a base and modified it a little. We used TinkerCad to build the structure from scratch in the summer section. We ran out of time so had to use pictures for fall and winter. All of the AR elements were done through echoAR and Unity.

Challenges we ran into

We initially wanted to have people in all of the sections but being beginners, we could not animate people so had to go with characters instead. Even then though, the characters were not moving in the AR mode as we expected so we ate up a lot of time attempting to fix it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Using Tinkercad to build something as detailed as I was able to was extremely fulfilling. We used GUI in Java but we only learned it very recently so we are glad that the program runs smoothly now.

What we learned

This was our first time using echoAR and AR technology. Although we cannot say we are any good at it, we did find out how to use it in many different scenarios and learned the intriguing applications of it in the real world(Seeing that the anatomy of a patient can be shown to a surgeon during surgery was eye-opening!).

What's next for Nippon XPerience

First, we would like to make 3d structures for fall and winter which we did not have enough time to do. Also, since we restricted ourselves to just the four seasons, it may be interesting to expand it to just hot-spots around Japan, so that people can learn even more about the different ways to enjoy their time there.

Built With

• echoar
• java
• sketchup
• thingiverse
• tinkercad
• unity