ULA Anywhere AR
For my first project at Valence, I was the lead developer on was ULA Anywhere AR, an education app designed to show off their upcoming Vulcan Centaur Rocket in real scale at the 35th Space Symposium.
Initially we prototyped using Unity and Vuforia to try and reduce the amount of cross platform work. After some testing we found that Vuforia’s tracking on Android without a QR target wasn’t stable enough for viewing the rocket at 1:1 scale, especially when looking too far vertically away from the anchor point. We made the decision to switch to using the ARCore and ARKit Unity SDKs for Android and iOS respectively and saw significant improvement.
Another requirement of the project was the visually show off ULA’s launch capabilities. We decided on scaling the earth down to 1 ten millionth scale and show the orbits of their previous launches to scale. For most man made objects orbiting earth a there is a publicly available TLE (Two-line element set) is you can use predict the position of that object at anytime. Using these we were able to both plot and animate satellites at the proper scale.
For more information you can visit the Valence Group website: ULA Anywhere AR