In early 2013 I built an augmented reality iOS companion app for our clients at Liberty Mutual. It was part of a market research report into responsibility but was also used to showcase in-house capabilities to our client at the same time. In addition to some 3d charts, the illustrations in the book, when viewed through the app, would come to life and speak their story in person.

I spent a great deal of effort making the effect as seamless as possible. My goal was to tightly match the animations to the physical illustration in the book so they did not look like a digital overlay but rather came alive in a very organic feeling way.

This involved perfect alignment of transparent video files, but to truly sell the effect I created a tone mapping script that would read the color and lighting variations in the target image and apply those to the overlay animations.

While potentially a bit gimmicky for a research report, our client was very proud of this book and so were we. I always thought this would be a great way to present a children’s book. This app was built for iOS with Unity3d using Qualcomm’s Vuforia SDK.