St. Ann's AR

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  1919 Photograph of St. Ann's Church

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  Aerial view of church foundation with measurements

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  Church in Unity scene with Cesium environment

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  Church on location in app

Inspiration

In Montreal, Canada, adjacent to its harbour, there is a neighbourhood called Griffintown that was settled through the 19th century by Irish immigrants, many of which arrived as refugees fleeing the Great Hunger between 1845-49. The area soon became Canada’s most notorious shantytown and (thanks to the Lachine Canal) was a major industrial centre and working-class community where a substantial portion of the young nation’s economic activity took place. Like many inner-city neighbourhoods in a modern international city, gentrification has transformed the area in to a modern, glass-walled residential area for some of Montreal's affluent / yuppie inhabitants - most of whom are oblivious to the history of the land where they reside. Today’s Griffintown resembles its former self in name only.

What it does

With our small AR app, we bridge the gap of time (and knowledge) between these two Griffintowns. In St Ann’s Park in the heart of the neighbourhood, there are the ruins of St. Ann’s Church. With great care, Nicola painstakingly modelled and textured the Church using archival black-and-white photographs as her only reference. Shea placed the 3D Church on its still-visible real-world foundation so that it could be viewed in AR. For context, we added some voice over narrations using text-to-speech software and a button with a hyperlink to Haunted Montreal’s web page where a local historian named Donovan King (owner/operator of Haunted Montreal) posted some ‘Haunted Research’ about the old Church. (More on that in the What’s Next Section)

How we built it

The application is built in Unity with the following packages ARCore ARFoundation + Extensions Geospatial Creator ChatGPT was an invaluable help to Shea as he had to learn the basics of Unity / mobile in a short amount of time. We simply placed a Geospatial Creator Anchor precisely on the Church’s foundation using its exact GPS coordinates. The Church mesh is a child of the anchor. Once physically on site, launch the app and the GPS / VPS takes care of the rest! As for the creation of the model and textures, Nicola did all of it by hand to best match the reference images. The programs used for art were Maya and Substance Painter. The dimensions were easy to figure out by measuring the foundation that still resides in the park.

Challenges we ran into

Firstly – we did not hear about the hackathon until it was halfway through, so we only had about a month to work on it in our spare time. The pressure was on! On Shea’s end – mostly problems arising from unfamiliarity in Unity, or trying to use it like Unreal. Meanwhile, mobile app development is adds an additional layer of challenge to get through the first time. The Church model seems to hover above the ground, and it’s taking some experimentation to get it exactly on the ground. In practical terms, the optimal viewing angle is smack in the middle of a busy intersection – this is not ideal. Special mention to the onset of Montreal’s notorious winter making filming and testing a cold and unpleasant experience. With the creation of the art, the sides of the church had no helpful references, so Nicola had to research to make some educated artistic choices there. All the textures were hand painted in Substance Painter by Nicola and took a decent amount of time to look right since the reference pictures were in black and white.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Before now the Church exists only in memory, text, and old black-and-white photographs. Nicola worked as quickly as she could with intense attention to detail to try and resurrect some of the neighbourhood’s old spirit. We are hopeful that some of Griffintown’s residents will be inspired to learn about their area after viewing the Church in AR! We expect to drive some traffic to Haunted Montreal, a local business that offers walking tours to Montreal’s residents and tourists.

What we learned

How easily we can place location-based AR experiences now thanks to Geospatial Creator and the accuracy enabled by VPS. AR can be used in an educational context. Optimized art pipelines to have successful art in Unity for mobile

What's next for St. Ann's AR

The owner of Haunted Montreal is very excited about the potential of AR and has expressed interest in exploring some more ideas to enhance the company’s walking tours.

Built With

• arcore
• geospatial
• mapsapi
• maya
• substance-painter
• unity