Lessons Learned
A significant portion of the challanges we faced were either partly or fully due to discrepancies between the testing and the development environments. Many features that worked with none or only minor issues in the development environment broke down completely when testing with our phones. There were for instance large enough differences in how the smog particles behaved to justify disabling it for the open house demo. The obvious lesson learnt here is to minimize the discrepancies between development and testing environments as much as possible and to make sure to properly test new features as often and thoroughly as possible.
Related Work
"Vuforia with OpenCV for Unity Example" (link). This includes examples done with the Vuforia engine. The code is freely available on GitHub.
"Cultivating Environmental Awareness: Modeling Air Quality Data Via Augmented Reality Miniature Trees" (link). This paper discuss the use of AR in an app to visualize poor air quality. They came to the conclusion that there are elements from environmental issues that can be gamified.
"BattleBoard 3D" (link) is a game that combines traditional board games with augmented reality. They discuss potential issues and workarounds related to AR games.
Challanges
It was difficult to make the game balanced and actually enjoyable. There was just too many parameters to keep track of in real time. The main focus of this project was supposed to be graphics and interaction, so there was not enough room available to make the game sensible. To mitigate this kind of problem in future projects, it is very important to acknowledge the scope of the project and its use cases. Because of the fact that there was several people in the group, compromises were made to make decisions quickly and thus make progress. These compromises was part of the reason why this group ended up with a too large scope, that could not be perfected in time.