The Solar System is our first educational Augmented Reality application we developed in 2010. Planet models are created as spheres in 3D modeling software (Swift3D) and later wrapped with a composite of Mercator scale planet images available from the NASA’s Web site. Resulting models fairly accurately represent the Solar System planets. However, the scale of planets is not maintained and all planets in this simulation are of the same size. We leave it up to you (students/educators) to figure out planet size ratio and properly resize the planets if you chose to work with these models. This could be a great exercise for the astronomy class.
Figure 1. Model of the Earth
Technical background: planets are designed with Swift 3D v.4 and exported in 3DS format. Once in 3DS format, planets are imported along with the markers into BuildAR pro to build our scene. Below is the video of this solar system as well as models of the planets.
Download source files here (AR Solar System 3D classroom files, AR markers and marker PDF files). Once you download the files, unzip them and follow the instructions inside of “Instructions.txt” file. We posted a brief instructional video on how to open up a scene on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3C97PPTinE
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