Brew

Brew is a prototype for an augmented reality application that allows customers to better know their beer. Using existing beer brand labels as markers, Brew displays information on suggested food pairings, the type of hops used during the brewing process, and standard brewing taste metrics. 

PROCESS

Beer is both delicious and surprisingly complicated, as is any fermented product since the final outcome can only be controlled to a point. Beer is also a luxury item, meaning people are often willing to take the time to understand how it tastes and what goes into the process of making it. This is important in designing an AR experience as people do have to go out of their way to download an app and bring out their phones to use it. Importantly, it's also something I have wanted to use myself. 

The information for this project was sourced from either the brewer's site or from a formerly in existence site called Under the Label that gave the following overview of information on many kinds of beer.

Seeing as I wanted to display multiple sets of info, I decided to dive into Vuforia Virtual Buttons, the idea being that obscuring notable parts of the image targets can cue an event. I thought it might be nice to have a “button” on the physical object since you would be holding the beer in your hand, most likely, so then you would just have to move your fingers around on the one hand since the other hand would have the phone. I got this to work pretty well with my hand and had positive feedback when I demo'ed the project for people. 

I also added sounds that trigger with each page, just for some more user feedback.

In the future, I would use cylindrical image targets and add autofocus into the app code to make the augmented images more stable and easier to trigger. The buttons also need some work, since they can be a bit fickle.

I am also interested in playing with some of the content and design based on more user feedback.

TOOLS:  Unity3D, Vuforia, Android Studio

ROLE:   Solo Project