Final Project: Chemical Reactions

Motivation

  • Spark Interest
  • Efficient, Cost-Effective, Safe Demonstrations
  • Interactions Facilitate Learning

This project is intended to get kids into Chemistry. I absolutely hated chemistry but the one thing I loved was watching all the crazy reactions that could happen. We were only able to do these experiments in very safe, supervised setting but who wants that? With this app people could take different chemicals and see what they look like, get more information about the element, and see how they react to very basic reactions.

How to Run:

Download the zip file[Chemical Reactions 3] above and open in Xcode Beta 9. You must be signed in to a developer account to run the application on an iPhone with iOS 11.2.

( If you would like to use the application in Unity, download the Chemical_Reactions_Unity.zip file. Before trying it out select the AR Camera and enable the Vuforia Database by expanding Vurofia and checking the Load Database checkboxes. You are still able to use the desktop as the camera.)

Functionalities:

  • Render Different Elements based on Image being tracked
  • Render Different Animation based on reactions with element and either water or fire
  • See more information about the element that is currently tracked

How to Use:

Once you've opened the file, build on xcode with an iphone attached. On the iphone, simply put the symbol you would like rendered on to the camera view.

To get more information about the element, tap on the "i" icon and if you are currently rendering an element, the information for that element will show. To remove the information, tap the "i" icon once more.

To view the fire reaction, place the plastic card with the fire icon facing up and place it in right above the element symbol. The squares should line right up and the augmentation of a flame test will now be visible. If nothing is showing, try to move the camera else where and try again.

To view the water reaction, place the plastic card with the water icon facing up and do the same as above. The water reactions range from small bubbles to flames to explosions so go ahead and explore!

Example: Barium Element Rendered

Information about Cesium shown on screen.

As I am putting the water icon over Barium there is no animation

After placing, you can see the reaction taking place on the augmentation with tiny bubbles.

Example of fire reaction on Strontium

Issues

  • Augmentation Tracking
  • Fire/Water

Some issues that I faced were that the augmentations would not show up even if the image was being detected. You would have to lose the image tracking first and then track it again to have it be visible. I found that activating all of the children of the image tracked worked but there are still issues with the fire reaction.

The Fire and Water icons are similar in shape and only have different colors which I believe is not a great way of seeing the differences between the two since color can change based on lighting and setting. A better way would be to create 2 completely different looking tiles to overlay on the elements

Hardware Platforms

IPhone 6 running on IOS 11.

Software

The software I will be using will be

  • Xcode 9 beta
  • Unity
  • (Possibly) Blender