The Old Crow AR application is an application I developed for author Hans Nordsiek. Through a colleague, he contacted me asking for someone with AR development experience for his book, Piloot met de Vijf Strepen.

The app allows people to place an airplane anywhere in the real world and start its engine.

The plane we used for this project is a repainted version of a model we purchased online. The model was repainted by artist Marcel Michorius, who did an amazing job. Apart from this, all of the work in this project was done by me.

While creating the floor scanning for this AR system, I noticed that the plane regularly lost tracking when you moved. This was particularly true outside. Since this application is meant to be used outside just as much as inside, I had to figure something out to fix this.

Eventually I solved it by using a trick. Every time a floor is found, I would save the plane data and extend it infinitely. I would then set up the tracking so that whenever it didn't find something, it would use the last plane. This eventually led to the current result, which is much smoother than without this trick.


Since I did this project all on my own, I had to create the UI myself. I hadn't really used Unity's animation system a lot, so this was very new to me. I was surprised by how easily I could create smooth animations that really made the UI feel more alive.