what is it?
The SquareFlame Portfolio app is a small demonstration of some of our skills, it was one of the first early apps we made for us that had the functionality for a playable game demo, Augmented reality demo and link backs to our website and what services we can offer.
why we did it?
This was primarily a free marketing piece that people could download if they were interested, although not too complex it covers a nice range of skills and has a decent UI making it relatively easy to use.
the tools we used
Adobe Photoshop CC
Naturally we used Adobe Photoshop CC to develop the imagery used for the app.
Unity
We mainly used UE4 when working with AR SLAM (Augmented Reality Simultaneous localization and mapping) which is a form of markerless augmented reality that maps your surroundings and places objects along it. This time we decided to try out Unity and see how different the process would be.
Libre Office Calc
We used Libre Office Calc to process all of the designs layouts and functionality we would like the prototype to contain, Using the file as a simple reference see progress.
SLAM AR (Simultaneous localization and mapping Augmented Reality)
There are many ways to work with Augmented Reality, the most well known being where you point your camera towards an image and when the image is recognized something is placed on top of it. The step on from this is SLAM AR, this technology doesn’t search for an image instead it look for contrasts in the camera itself as you look around, using the camera data ( and more tech in the background ) it estimates what It thinks surfaces are and maps them out, you can then use this generated terrain as you wish.
In this case we primarily use Slam to detect surfaces for which we can move our base onto and place down. This is a really cool form of AR and is the natural progression of AR.
Game Demos and IOS
We found that having a demo of our products is cool for an app, but is not supported by the iOS stores. Due to limited functionality and the terminology of “Portfolion / Demo”. We would instead have to upload a fully fleshed out product to get it working on the stores. Because of this we could not get through the review process. But we were successful on releasing it to Android stores.
How it looks
