KLM Earth is a mobile AR experiment meant to discover the current possibillities of AR. It is made as a proof of concept for an eventual add-on to the KLM app.

This application, as well as the concept, was developed by me and the UI was created based on designs by Mustafa Ahmed, our UI/UX Designer at the time.

Since I was the only developer who came up with and worked on this project, almost all work was done by me. The only exclusion being the UI design

The way the globe should appear was long subject to discussion. I wasn't sure what would work best, but I knew I had to use a way that would make it seem like the earth came out of the real environment. I decided the best way would be to use a portal from space.




The challenge with this was that I don't have depth information, so it is very difficult to hide the AR object behind real objects. I went around this by using a stencil buffer. This is practically an invisible plane on the floor that hides objects underneath. By creating a mesh for this and opening the hole for the earth to come true, I made the animation seem more natural.

This still had an issue though. The portal felt very flat and didn't feel like a hole in the floor. I solved this by putting a thin hollow cylinder under the portal, to make it appear to have an edge. I also added a space texture underneath, so it seems like the object came from space.