Not long ago, the renowned broadcasting company BBC launched its very first application based on Augmented Reality, the Civilisations AR. Designed and developed by BBC R&D, BBC Arts and Nexus Studios, this app is now available to download for Android and iOS users worldwide.
Civilisations AR features most of the human history with a huge collection of over 5000 different art pieces belonging to 31 countries. BBC has also collaborated with around 30 museums and exhibits across the UK. All this has been made possible with the help of a 3D digital scanner that scanned each and every artifact and prepared a digital 3D model out of the archetype pieces.
The app allows anyone with an AR capable smartphone and a working internet connection, to browse through all these worldwide museums and artifacts while sipping a cup of tea at their homes. Users can also explore some of the most prominent artifacts such as 1350s Madonna and Child from Italy, UK Roman Statue of Mars, Mummy in Egyptian coffin, 196 BC’s The Rosetta Stone from Egypt and many others.
Not only that, Civilisations AR goes a lot further and allows the user to listen to the audio and images related to the particular artifact using the “Magic Spotlight” feature present within the app. You can also see through an artifact such as the Egyptian Mummy with the cool X-Ray functionality that makes the app greatly inevitable.
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With the help of an AR Globe, users can easily find the place of their interest and search for any artifact geographically, or you can browse the artifacts based on various themes sorted in an organized manner.
“We’ve designed and built it to be a totally reusable product, and we will be looking to use develop more AR projects in the future once we have had the chance to analyse the data from this one” said Eleni Sharp, Executive Product Manager for BBC Research and Development.
All this had been made possible using the video game development tool “Unity Middleware” along with the help of Android and iOS ARCore and ARKit respectively allowing the developers to portray realistic 3D objects and pack it all into a small mobile application.