Boredom, frustration, loneliness, and fear. Those are all things experienced by quarantined people. And those factors can cause mental health issues, including anxiety, depression, self-harm, and even suicide. Sure, this seems a little bit over exaggerated, right?

🙄

During the pandemic, about 4 in 10 adults in the U.S. have reported anxiety or depressive disorder symptoms, a share that has been largely consistent, up from one in ten adults who reported these symptoms from January to June 2019.

Well, I would be naive to think that I could change anything regarding this problem, but it then hit me.

What if we could use AR to make social interaction with friends easier? Let them meet up online in groups, but they would be able to talk to some individuals during those calls, kind of like a real room, where you can go into a corner of a room with your friend, using your phone.

This would not solve the root of the problem, which is covid, but it would make the situation better. Plus, I would learn a lot about AR, which is super cool.

So here's the plan:

Have people join a room using their phone, which has a camera and, in the best case, AR Sensors to better the experience. Let them walk around in a 3x3 meters environment, and depending on everybody's position relative to each other, the volume output changes.

I mean - thats the plan - seems pretty easy, right?

ive been already seeing solutions like that in the 2d online space, kinda like zoom but where you can move yur caracter on a map, howver, not interactive and in 3d

I decided to turn this into a seven day challange, which was actually one of the very few unrealistic timelines I kept.

So the basics were pretty easy. During the first day, I worked to place objects and use acceleration and motion detectors to calculate an object's position relative to the phone's camera and then display it in front of it.

The next thing that I had to do was adding physics cause I believe they are cool and are literally the foundation of Reality. To create a realistic environment with an interactive feel to it, this was definitely a challenge as it almost fried my pc multiple times.

The problem now is that the bodies of Players are still just fucking rounded mathematical objects, which do not look human in any way, so yeah, that happened next. Instead, I replaced them with some wired white characters, which makes it look way less cringe.