“David Bowie is” is an app created by creative sound and media studio Planeta. Planeta used Unity to adapt the original museum exhibition for AR, featuring high-resolution captures and immersive settings. Here, Planeta talk about some of their creative and technical challenges.

“ David Bowie is”是由创意声音和媒体工作室Planeta创建的应用程序。 Planeta使用Unity将原始博物馆展览改编为AR，具有高分辨率拍摄和身临其境的设置。 在这里，Planeta谈论了他们的一些创意和技术挑战。

The music world lost a true original with the passing of David Bowie in 2016. Bowie was more than an iconic pop star; he was a consummate artist and innovator, continually reinventing himself with new stage personas and moving through musical styles and genres with ease. With a career that spanned 40 years, David Bowie cast a long shadow on world culture.

随着大卫·鲍伊(David Bowie)在2016年的去世，音乐界失去了真正的原作。鲍伊不仅仅是一个标志性的流行歌手； 他是一位出色的艺术家和创新者，不断以新的舞台人物来重塑自己，并轻松地进行音乐风格和流派的迁移。 大卫·鲍伊(David Bowie)拥有40年的职业生涯，对世界文化投下了长长的阴影。

Bowie was wild about technology and how it affects the human experience. His first big hit, “Space Oddity,” released before the Apollo moon landing, told the tale of a wayward astronaut longing for home. His 1976 song TVC15 warned about the addictive nature of television via a “hologramic” broadcast – a full year before Princess Leia projected onto a tabletop. And in the early days of the Internet boom, Bowie saw the disruptive potential of the web and started his own AOL-style ISP, BowieNet, to serve his fan community.

鲍伊(Bowie)对技术及其对人类体验的影响深信不疑。 在阿波罗登月之前，他的第一首热门单曲《太空奇缘》(Space Oddity)讲述了一个渴望回家的宇航员的故事。 他在1976年演唱的TVC15歌曲通过“全息”广播警告了电视的令人上瘾的性质-整整整整整整整整整整整整整整整的年在Leia公主放到桌面上之前。 在互联网蓬勃发展的初期，鲍伊看到了网络的破坏性潜力，并创立了自己的AOL风格的ISP鲍伊网，为他的粉丝社区服务。

The exhibit David Bowie is premiered at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2013, honoring the artist while he was still alive, and traveled the world for five years. As the tour was winding down, leads at Sony Music began thinking about how to preserve the essential elements of the show – and Bowie’s legacy – in XR, and found the team at Planeta to help create an AR experience.

大卫·鲍伊(David Bowie)的展览于2013年在伦敦的维多利亚和阿尔伯特博物馆(Victoria and Albert Museum)首次亮相，以纪念这位艺术家还活着的时候，他环球旅行了五年。 随着巡回演出的结束，索尼音乐公司的负责人开始考虑如何在XR中保留演出的基本元素以及鲍伊的遗产，并在Planeta成立了团队来帮助创造AR体验。

The result is the app David Bowie is, an augmented reality recreation of the museum show that features 2D and 3D representations of artifacts from the show, along with hours of audio and video of Bowie’s music and performances. The app was made with Unity, using our ARKit support for the original iOS version, then moving to AR Foundation to build for Android. The app was launched on Bowie’s birthday, January 8, 2019; he would have been 72. It’s awesome. As an avid Bowie fan myself, I think he would have loved it.

结果是应用程序David Bowie是博物馆展览的增强现实娱乐，具有展览中文物的2D和3D表示，以及Bowie音乐和表演的音频和视频时间。 该应用程序是使用Unity制作的，使用的是我们对原始iOS版本的ARKit支持，然后转移到AR Foundation为Android构建。 该应用程序于2019年1月8日在Bowie的生日上启动; 他那时已经72岁了。 作为我自己的狂热鲍伊迷，我想他会喜欢的。

I recently caught up with the folks from Planeta – Nick Dangerfield, Jimi Stine, Dan Brewster and Pilar Aranda – to talk about the project:

我最近采访了Planeta的人– Nick Dangerfield，Jimi Stine，Dan Brewster和Pilar Aranda –讨论了该项目：

How did this project come to land at Planeta?

这个项目是如何在Planeta登陆的？

Akiko Ozawa, of Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc., is a devoted fan of David Bowie and of the V&A show. Two years ago, she brought David Bowie is to Tokyo; when the show did its final leg in Brooklyn last year, Akiko thought that a full copy of the show should be preserved in XR for posterity. So she started looking for a studio to help out. As our work on immersive tech is mostly around music and visual arts, Akiko felt that we’d be up to the task.

Sony Music Entertainment(Japan)Inc.的小泽彰子(Akiko Ozawa)是David Bowie和V＆A节目的忠实粉丝。 两年前，她带戴维·鲍伊(David Bowie)去东京； 当该节目于去年在布鲁克林举行最后一站演出时，明子子认为该节目的完整副本应保留在XR中以供后代使用。 因此，她开始寻找工作室来提供帮助。 由于我们在沉浸式技术方面的工作主要围绕音乐和视觉艺术，因此Akiko认为我们可以胜任这项工作。

What were your biggest challenges on this project both technically and creatively?

您在技术和创意上对该项目最大的挑战是什么？

At the outset, our biggest challenge was answering the questions: What does a mobile AR gallery look like? How do you move through it? We’re no strangers to creating virtual art galleries – Planeta has developed seven VR gallery/exhibition spaces since 2016 — but to do so for the small screen, while simultaneously incorporating over 400 objects of varied media, required days and days of design discussion to figure out. The technical questions primarily dealt with the massive amount of asset data. Discerning the most coherent and beautiful way to display these objects was one thing, but doing so smoothly and seamlessly was a challenge all its own. In that sense the design was limited by the tech – there’s only so much that mobile AR can handle. Making sure that every item was properly tagged with an accurate description and title also took a considerable amount of QA.

一开始，我们最大的挑战是回答以下问题：移动AR画廊是什么样的？ 你如何经历它？ 我们对创建虚拟美术馆并不陌生-自2016年以来Planeta已开发了七个VR画廊/展览空间-但这样做是为了在小屏幕上进行，同时将400多种不同媒体的对象合并在一起，这需要几天甚至几天的设计讨论时间弄清楚。 技术问题主要涉及大量资产数据。 辨别显示这些对象的最连贯和美观的方式是一回事，但是如何顺畅而无缝地进行却是一个挑战。 从这个意义上说，设计受到技术的限制–移动AR只能处理这么多。 确保每个项目都正确标记了正确的描述和标题，这也需要花费大量的质量检查。

Describe how Unity helped make your process easier or solved a problem for you. Were there any specific Unity features you leveraged?

描述Unity如何帮助您简化过程或为您解决问题。 您是否利用了任何特定的Unity功能？

AR integration via AR Foundation was great to get us up and running. As a tool, the overall malleability of the Editor was extremely useful in creating specific workflows that saved us countless hours. The asset store ecosystem also saved us tons of time as we were able to purchase tools and visual effects that would have taken up far too much of our limited resources otherwise.

通过AR Foundation进行的AR集成非常适合使我们启动并运行。 作为一种工具，编辑器的整体可塑性在创建特定的工作流程方面非常有用，该工作流程为我们节省了无数的时间。 资产存储生态系统还节省了我们大量的时间，因为我们能够购买工具和视觉效果，否则这些工具和视觉效果会占用过多的有限资源。

What artists/creators have inspired your work and to do what you do?

哪些艺术家/创作者启发了您的作品并做了您的工作？

This will definitely sound corny, but in this case our guiding light was David Bowie and his constellation of influences, which is essentially saying the best art made in the twentieth century. David Bowie had an incredibly fine eye for good work, and one of the perks of this project has been revisiting some of the most influential artists of our time, from Bauhaus to Brian Eno.

这肯定听起来很老套，但是在这种情况下，我们的指导思想是戴维·鲍伊(David Bowie)及其影响力，这实际上是在说20世纪最好的艺术。 大卫·鲍伊(David Bowie)对出色的作品有着难以置信的敏锐眼光，这个项目的特权之一是重新审视从包豪斯(Bauhaus)到布莱恩·伊诺(Brian Eno)等当代最有影响力的艺术家。

What advice would you give someone embarking on a similar archival-type project in AR?

您对在AR中从事类似档案类型项目的人有什么建议？

It’s important to understand that David Bowie is acts as a recreation of an expansive exhibition on a phone more than it does as an archive. That being said, it’s really important to capture the display materials at the best possible quality. The images we made for the project were taken by an archival art photographer from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

重要的是要了解，戴维·鲍伊(David Bowie)不仅是电话上的大型展览的娱乐场所，还更是作为档案馆的娱乐场所。 话虽如此，以尽可能最佳的质量捕获显示材料非常重要。 我们为该项目制作的图像是由大都会艺术博物馆的档案艺术摄影师拍摄的。

As for advice related to future galleries, we’d say it’s important to remember that we are no longer confined to the architecture of traditional museums. While it’s understandable that other projects seek to replicate the museum experience 1:1, we feel projects are more successful when imaginative spaces are created, leveraging only certain techniques of standard presentation to help acclimate the user to the experience. So much can be done with sound and light to create an optimal or interesting atmosphere in which to view a piece of art – why limit ourselves to the same white-walled incandescent light-filled boxes we’ve always known?

至于与未来美术馆有关的建议，我们要说重要的是要记住，我们不再局限于传统博物馆的建筑。 虽然其他项目寻求以1：1的比例复制博物馆体验是可以理解的，但我们认为，当创建具有想象力的空间时，项目会更加成功，它们仅利用标准展示的某些技术来帮助用户适应体验。 声音和光可以做很多事情，以创造一种最佳或有趣的氛围，让您欣赏艺术品–为什么将自己局限于我们一直都知道的相同的白墙白炽灯箱？

How did you optimize all the object scans to render so well in mobile AR? What photogrammetry software did you use?

您如何优化所有对象扫描以使其在移动AR中表现得如此出色？ 您使用什么摄影测量软件？

The models were the most labor-intensive aspect of the whole project. After photographing and scanning each costume (for the record, that’s over 50 costumes captured in five days!), we used a combination of Agisoft Photoscan and Maya to combine all our data. From there, the finishing was all done by hand and was completed only a few days before we launched.

这些模型是整个项目中劳动强度最大的方面。 在拍摄并扫描了每种服装之后(据记录，在五天内捕获了50多个服装！)，我们使用了Agisoft Photoscan和Maya的组合来组合所有数据。 从那里开始，所有的整理工作都是手工完成的，仅在我们推出前几天就完成了。

To optimize the assets we did tons of balancing and play-testing to test for performance and overall usability. Ultimately, we decided, in most cases, to show a reduced poly model in the scene context, and up-res it after it had been selected. Similarly, all the models are presented without lighting data once they’ve been selected, which helps to show off the detail captured in the photogrammetry data.

为了优化资产，我们进行了大量的平衡和测试，以测试性能和整体可用性。 最终，我们决定在大多数情况下，在场景上下文中显示简化的多边形模型，并在选定模型后对其进行放大处理。 同样，一旦选中所有模型，它们将不显示光照数据，这有助于炫耀摄影测量数据中捕获的细节。

I love how each scene starts by rendering the pass-through camera and eventually fades to black, making you feel like you could be in the museum. Was this purely for aesthetic reasons or was performance optimization a factor?

我喜欢每个场景都是通过渲染直通相机开始的，然后逐渐淡出为黑色，让您感觉自己好像在博物馆里。 这是纯粹出于美学原因还是性能优化是一个因素？

Fading to black was purely aesthetic. We played around with varying levels of background opacity for the duration of development; at one point we almost included a slider that would let users adjust the background opacity as much as they wanted. Ultimately, however, we decided to keep the background black to keep the attention on the assets themselves. Too much camera view would lead to confusion between real and virtual spaces. While that blurred line is usually considered a perk of AR, we felt that if we were going to create an immersive, museum-quality experience, we would need to have total control of the visuals.

褪色是纯粹的美学。 在开发过程中，我们在不同背景水平下玩耍。 在某一点上，我们几乎包含了一个滑块，该滑块可让用户根据需要调整背景不透明度。 但是，最终，我们决定将背景设为黑色，以引起对资产本身的关注。 太多的相机视野会导致真实空间与虚拟空间之间的混淆。 虽然那条模糊的线通常被认为是AR的优势，但我们认为，如果要创建沉浸式的，博物馆级的体验，就需要完全控制视觉效果。

How do you feel about the end result? Is it the end?

您如何看待最终结果？ 结束了吗？

We are very happy with the end result, especially given the limited time frame we had to work with (roughly six months from start to finish). There are, of course, features we would have loved to include, but there just wasn’t the time to implement them. As of right now, we don’t have any plans to continue working on David Bowie is.

我们对最终结果感到非常满意，特别是考虑到我们必须处理的时间有限(从开始到结束大约六个月)。 当然，我们本来希望包含一些功能，但是没有时间实施它们。 截至目前，我们尚无任何继续从事David Bowie的计划。

What’s next for Planeta?

Planeta的下一步是什么？

Our next digital project will build extensively on our history of making new kinds of spaces to exhibit more traditional forms of art. Incorporating what we’ve learned from our past work, and partnering with artists and institutions alike, we aim to create a new cultural events space in virtual reality. This project would be a multiplayer environment with both permanent and temporary exhibitions, designed alongside the best minds in architecture, sound design and lighting.

我们的下一个数字项目将广泛地基于我们创造新空间来展示更多传统艺术形式的历史。 结合我们从过去的工作中学到的知识，并与艺术家和机构合作，我们旨在在虚拟现实中创建新的文化活动空间。 该项目将是一个具有永久性和临时性展览的多人游戏环境，并与建筑，声音设计和照明领域的顶尖人才一起设计。

翻译自: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/03/26/david-bowie-is-in-ar-how-planeta-built-a-killer-app-with-unity/