Is this possible with Playcanvas?

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Hola folks,

I come from a Networking/Systems background. Cisco type of world, so all this is new to me. I have a mild autistic kid and want to make learning fun for him. I have been exploring other paid AR platforms, but prefer something opensource as I like code tinkering.

I came across playcanvas today and wanted to ask community, if its possible to a take picture of a text book page and make that as marker (I think that’s what you guys call it), and then add some button or arrows pointing to some text or picture. When the button/arrow is pressed on the screen, then a popup appears and kid can watch a youtube video or listen to a sound recording or a 3d model starts to play (for eg: An elephant making sound)

Second question was , can I make some words or paragraph as marker. For eg, there is a sentence called " Meet Jojo, the mighty elephant". Is it possible to make the word elephant as a marker. So when elephant is clicked, a pop up appear or a 3d model appears as elephant, and when the word elephant is pressed again, the 3d model disappears.

Last question. I could not find any reference to any view app. After reading here and there. I figured that once you create a project. You can export it to web html or android etc. My question in mind was: My kid has about 7 books (maths, science, Geography etc). If I was to scan each page of science book and make that as one project, then I can export that as one app. Now, If I do that for other books, then I will end up creating multiple apps.

So is it possible to have one app to view any page from any book and enjoy AR features.

My apologies for all newbee questions.

Thank you for your time folks. If this works out, I will write an article on how it was done. Hopefully it will help other parents too.

Cheers

HD

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Hello @desiuncle welcome to Playcanvas, first good luck with your project, with that i means the reply is yes to all your questions. First & second: yes you can use the scanned pages and use them as markers, or use smaller makers in portions of page. It’s possible also to make the elephant appear using one of the marks as well as other models. You can make different apps, one for each book or a single app that use multiple books with a menu(not sure about the space this second version will get). I think someone of the team can give more specific info or address you to some project similar (also if i don’t think anyone has done it till now). The most difficult part will be find the 3d models to use. Anyway good luck! It’s a great idea!

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Thanks @ayrin , I feel motivated and encouraged. Cheers

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Unfortunately not due to the marker limitations with ar.js. That thick black border is needed for detection which the book won’t have.

I recommend using Unity as there are a number of AR SDKs that will help you do what you have described above. (Vuforia is the one that comes to mind).