Lately, it’s impossible to walk in the street without crossing strollers strolling with their eyes riveted on their smartphones. Nothing new, you say? Haven’t we all become totally dependent on our handhelds for a long time? In this specific case, however, one detail makes all the difference: all these people raise their phones high and use it to reach an apparently invisible target. I quickly understood the reasons for this strange behavior: I was watching Pokémon hunters, literally immersed in the augmented reality of the game Pokémon Go.
This Pikachu character was made in SOLIDWORKS 2016 by Victor Armas from VDRA Designs.
If you don’t know Pokémon Go, come back to planet Earth as soon as possible to discover a new world in which fiction and reality are inseparable. Initially, a simple April Fool’s Day associating Google Maps and characters from the famous cartoon, Pokémon Go has since 2014 become a social phenomenon on a global scale which takes up all of your time. It quickly overtook Snapchat and Facebook in terms of daily use (43 minutes per day for the average user) and established itself in less than a week as the most downloaded app in Apple’s App Store. .
In Pokémon Go, players enter an augmented reality world to catch and train imaginary creatures named Pikachu or Squirtle, which appear in everyday environments overlaid on the phone screen. The app is being applauded for taking gamers out into the great outdoors to chase these adorable virtual characters. But his real tour de force is to have familiarized the general public with augmented reality; this interconnection of the real and the virtual.
What exactly is augmented reality?
As a former journalist in the technology industry, I have been familiar with augmented reality and virtual reality technologies for several decades, two promising concepts which have not yet led to real professional applications. Augmented reality refers to a real environment in which certain elements are covered, or “augmented”, by computer-generated images and sounds.
In terms of product design, the potential applications are obvious. Every engineer knows the advantages of virtual prototypes, which allow simulations to be carried out upstream of the manufacture of a product. What if it was possible to integrate this virtual product into a real environment in order to test the assembly capabilities of a factory? Or to show a customer what a product looks like in their salon before it even exists?
eDrawings and augmented reality: together since 2013
It was in 2013, at our annual SOLIDWORKS World conference, that we announced the upcoming release of an augmented reality-based update for eDrawings. eDrawings is the solution of choice for all engineers and designers who need to quickly show and share their concepts, including full assemblies of full-size parts. Thanks to augmented reality, the application is now able to give context and scale to virtual products.
This is a bigger factor than it seems. Indeed, a remote control or a car, two very different products, have exactly the same size on the screen of a computer, an iPad or a smartphone. While it is of course possible to use the zoom to optimize the workspace, there is no visual reference to place the displayed object in its context and compare it to other objects in a real environment. In general, it is therefore necessary to build a physical model, a stage to which it is very often difficult and expensive to go back.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could place your virtual concept on your table next to real objects? Wouldn’t it be extraordinary to move and orient your product in a real environment to capture its true proportions? Better yet, how about doing this at any stage of the design process and as often as you want?
With eDrawings, it is possible. Available on iOS and Android in Standard or Professional version, eDrawings allows the entire design team, but also customers and partners, to see the product in life size in order to clearly communicate its actual size to stakeholders. You can use the Configurations option to load a whole range of products into eDrawings, then use augmented reality to show your customer all the variations directly.
Thanks to augmented reality, you can show your virtual product in a realistic context to everyone involved. All in all, the eDrawings app has only one flaw: it won’t help you catch Pokémon.
