Augmented reality and its many associated applications (in industry, commerce, video games, education…) has entered our lives.

Portalp, an automatic doors designer and manufacturer, was used to selling its products with static presentation (paper or web catalog). The company wanted to move to a more immersive experience for its customers, letting them visualize how its doors could be integrated on-site. AViSTO was selected to address this challenge.

Develop an app based on augmented reality

Portalp wanted to develop an app that could:

• Replace on the screen device being used (smartphone or tablet) a gaping hole or a current gate with an automatic door. This automatic door would come from the Portalp catalogue composed of many types of doors – sliding, telescopic, round or curved; revolving automatic doors; entrance doors; emergency exit doors; hospital doors, firebreak doors…
• Choose the opening direction, the colors and the dimensions of the virtual door
• Open and close the virtual door
• Capture the image to share it afterwards (by e-mail, for example)

Technical challenges

During the project, AViSTO took up the following technical challenges.

Setting and tracking the door zone using:

• The Vuforia™ library (Qualcomm®)
• The Native Development Kit for integration
• The Java Native Interface for exchanges between libraries

Make realistic 3D renderings of automatic doors:

• Converting SolidWorks objects to Wavefront format
• Implementing a 3D engine using OpenGL ES 2.0
• Operatiing materials and illumination of 3D objects using shaders

Make full use of Android framework :

• Application components: Intents, Activities, Fragments, Loaders, Content Providers, etc.
• User interface: ActionBar, ListView, GridView,
• ViewPager, Dialogs, Toasts, etc.
• Storage: SQLite database, photo album
• Imput devices: camera, gestures detection