21st Century Pop Up Books

The Pokemon game was all the rage. It was impossible to control my middle school kids because our school was a Pokemon hotspot. I was intrigued by this game and its popularity, so I jumped on the bandwagon to understand its addictive nature. Capitalizing on student interest to build curriculum has always proved to be beneficial. So I decided to do just that.

The students were working on a comic book that illustrated the loss of animal habitats and the affect it has on our eco system in different biomes around the world. I decided to give this project a twist. I told the kids we were making a our own Pop Up Book of virtual animals just like the Pokemon game. We will make our first Augmented Reality based AR Application using Unity and run it using an Android or iOS device.

We used Google Sketchup to draw 1-2 animals from the Biome. We added texture to the 3D animal object to make it realistic. This build took about 4-5 periods to complete.

Then we created virtual buttons with Vuforia in Unity 3D. Unity is a scripting language, and is very popular today because it is used to create augmented & virtual reality games. Unity scripts make our animals POP UP from the book.