Come Alive Cards

Come Alive Cards started on 19th May 2019 with a simple gift for a friend on her birthday. Since I wanted to make it special, I came up with the idea of making it AR-enabled. The video of the card posted on Snapchat and Instagram gained some attention and subsequently people started ordering custom cards for their loved ones.
Till date I have made about 30 cards outside the friends and family circle for clients from various cities of India and internationally for clients in the UK, USA and Singapore.

I bought my Playstation 4 with the money I earned from selling Come Alive Cards to clients. I started a facebook page for people to rate my service and subseuently also a website. It became important to give a demo to people before they could buy customised cards for themselves, that is why I launched a playstore application that demonstrates the capabilities of a Come Alive Card. I gave a demo of this application and its project structure to the students of St. Francis Institute of Technology and it was very well received by the students.

Following are the components of the Come Alive Cards Playstore application:-

• Vuforia Unity SDK for image recognition.
• 3D Models and Animations generated using Adobe Fuse and rigged with mixamo.
• Soundtrack switching logic - to have a different song played for every picture.
• Greeting cards designed using Inkscape and used as AR Target for the Vuforia SDK.

For a customised Come Alive Card, the client's photographs act as the AR targets and the 3D characters are modelled to resemble the people in the photograph.

Future : I have written a paper on generating 3D-Characters using Convolutional Neural Networks and 3D-Character Factory. I plan to implement the CNN and use it with a combination of Vuforia SDK and Unity3D to make the Come Alive Cards playstore application generate an AR Greeting Card realtime. This will automate the task of creating custom Come Alive Cards and more importantly it will be available for free.