SMARTinez Tech
You don't have to travel to a galaxy far, far away to visit classic Star Wars locations. For the 45th anniversary of George Lucas's industry-transforming space opera — which opened in theaters on May 25, 1977 — Yahoo Entertainment is taking fans on a virtual tour of three iconic sets that are still standing today in Tunisia. The North African republic served as the setting for the desert planet Tatooine, which plays a key role in in Star Wars: A New Hope and the nine-film Skywalker Saga as the childhood home of Jedi master Luke Skywalker. Tunisia is also central to Lucas's own creative evolution from a young storyteller into the architect of one of modern moviedom's most enduring myths.
This experience puts the user in the heart of the most iconic Tatooine locations in Star Wars:
Using a combination of photogrammetry, audio interviews, and creative 3D modeling, the experience freezes a specific moment in time during the riot, allowing users to walk through the actual group of people and hear what each one of them have to say.
The models were textured with images of newspaper articles from the original riot.
The Stonewall Inn Riot was distributed on iOS using the AR SDK (later rebranded to Immersive SDK)
The AR SDK is a product I built for iOS on top of ARKit designed to provide robust AR experiences with features such as sound playback, object carousels, theming and branding, simplified call-to-action (CTA) implementation, custom shaders, object selection and interactivity, and so much more.
The Stonewall Inn experience utilized much of these capabilities. It showcased the real-world scaling abilities, multi-channel audio playback and cueing features, object billboarding, among others.
Although the servers hosting the experience have been taken down by Yahoo, you can still check out the article below.
