Nydia: The Blind Flower Girl

This project is an educational AR experience using 8th Wall's VPS and Gaussian Splat capabilities. In this experience you will be able to transport yourself back to Pompeii during the time of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius​ and learn all about the harrowing tale of Nydia, a blind flower girl.

This experience uses the power of VPS to track the statue in real-time and anchor augmented reality content to the statue itself. We 3D modeled the imagined environment around Nydia in her story, and then to further push the realism we digitally photo-scanned the model and created a .ply Gaussian splat of it to capture a high level of detail. We then converted this .ply to an .spz to make it compatible with 8th Wall's Studio to bring it into our scene. Once we established a detailed setting for Nydia, we added educational UI with voiceover narration to verbally tell her story, and interactive hotspots to allow users to explore at their own pace. Spatial audio encapsulates the scene with different sounds in different locations to really make the user feel like they are there with Nydia in this moment captured in time.