AR Equipment X-ray

For an HVAC conference in January 2015, we made an augmented reality iPad app to see the inside of a new equipment unit we were debuting. There were many challenges with this project: the iPad model it had to run on was the original iPad Air, the equipment unit was a cube with very few unique points for anchoring & tracking with machine vision, and we wanted to see into the unit (but not through it). In the end we had to bake the lights inside of the unit to get a usable framerate. We also set the external shell faces to only render 1-sided, which gave us the ability to walk around the model and see the equipment frame behind the internal components from all angles. We had recently lost access to Metaio (thanks Apple), so CAD mapping wasn't an option. I ended up using some clever positioning tricks with photographs on the show floor to map the labels/logos to associated starting coordinates/scales and then using the iPad's gyroscope and image recognition to orient itself as the user moved around the unit.