Métro Kairo[s] - Augmented reality application

Métro Kairo[s] is an artistic work in augmented reality [AR] designed to immerse passers-by in a Cairo souk in sound form. Equipped with a cell phone on their belt and HD headphones, onlookers can wander through a network of lines representing the space they're walking through, immersing themselves in sounds and conversations as if they were in the Cairo souk.

Technologies used

This application was developed natively in C# using the Unity game engine. The library used for augmented reality is OpenCV.

As the use of augmented reality and animated 3D models is very resource-intensive, especially for a cell phone, particular attention was paid to optimizing the code and 3D models.

Using the OpenCV library, the challenge was to calculate the correspondence between the pixel displacement on the image stream and the user's actual displacement.

Thanks to the use of image recognition, the Kairos augmented reality application geolocates users' movements precisely from a fixed position, without the need for external modules.

The interlacing lines of color on the floor had several functions:

• Clearly indicate the space of the artwork
• Add a touch of color, like perhaps a souk in Cairo
• Increase the number of tracking points and thus improve the placement of users in the space.

This work was made and exhibited for the Festival de la Cité de Lausanne in 2017 at Ouchy.

The application was created using the Unity game engine and the OpenCV image recognition library. A virtual souk was created on Unity, and thanks to telemetry data returned by the OpenCV library, the user was placed in the virtual world.

Augmented reality application created for IF Compagnie.

Video presentation

Image gallery