Andrei Feskovich, a fifth-year student of the TSU Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science and staff member of the VR/AR laboratory, has won the UMNIK competition in the virtual and augmented reality area. He will develop a library for creating a user interface that will simplify, speed up, and streamline the creation of AR applications.
- If initially virtual and augmented reality applications were used mainly in the entertainment industry, now they are used in a wide variety of areas, from the oil and gas industry to the space industry, - says Andrey Feskovich. - There are a lot of libraries for the development of such applications, but in my experience, ready-made solutions from them have practically not been used and are not used without changes. Programmers either look at these ready-made solutions and write their own, or redraw them, or even worse, add a working, but unstable, solution to them.
The idea of the project is that for the development of modern, increasingly complex augmented and virtual reality applications, more modern, flexible solutions are needed. They will help to create a user interface of any complexity and do not violate the extensibility and mutability of these applications.
The author intends to provide the necessary flexibility of solutions by presenting them in the form of modules arranged in a certain way. The finished library will include new architectural solutions aimed at improving properties such as connectivity, linking, simplicity in the creation of their own variants by other programmers, and others.
- For example, there is an object in a play space. A software module is attached to it, which defines a number of its functionalities: how you interact with the object, how it looks, and much more, - explains Andrey Feskovich. - But if you need to change something (movement or visual), even if only slightly, you will have to redraw the ready-made solution offered to you by the library. I want to increase its variability by splitting the whole solution into more modules. The idea is trivial, but here's exactly how to do it, so that it is still convenient, but also flexible - this is the main task. And I have several ideas.
To understand the trends of modern AR/VR development, Andrey Feskovich analyzes the libraries presented on the global market and new applications that are being launched by leading companies in AR/VR.
The new product will be distributed through the Unity Asset Store for free or for a nominal fee for those who do not make money from using it, and the enterprise version will be at a cost.