Molten Corps

Molten Corps was a semester long project made by a team of 5 people at the CMU ETC. Our client came to us with the goal of using AR to depict the blast furnaces in a way that would help a guest better understand the information they would be digesting on a tour. We asked both the tour guides and real tourists what they would like to see in an AR experience and developed the two most popular scenes - the cast house and the car dumper. Because this would be deployed out in the field on phones, we tried very hard to optimize our models and physics calculations. Scenes like the flowing iron were done using fluid simulation in Blender and then baked for transfer to Unity. The scene of materials falling into the blast furnace also employed some clever techniques to reduce lag due to physics calculations including using simple sphere colliders and disabling gravity for the materials at the bottom.

This project, while very constrained in the content, allowed us to experiment with AR technology to turn a topic that most people have a hard time engaging with into a fun and exciting experience. I think this was very valuable for me as an experience designer.