Development of an AR App’s Proof of Concept for a Global Neurobiology R&D Company

Customer

The Customer is a global neurobiology R&D company with over 100,000 employees worldwide. The Customer is driven by the mission to find revolutionary treatments of existing diseases and provide easy access to these treatments even in the least developed regions of the world.

Challenge

The Customer wanted to create an AR application that would vividly demonstrate the working principle of their newly researched drug for a neurologic brain disease. They wanted the app to be compatible with iOS devices but lacked the competencies in both iOS and AR application development.

Solution

The Customer commissioned ScienceSoft to deliver a proof of concept for AR application development. They provided their functional requirements for the PoC – and ScienceSoft assembled a team of a project manager, a 3D model designer, and an iOS developer to deliver it. The team chose Kanban as their project methodology to guarantee the highest productivity and ensure delivery in the minimum time.

The PoC development project started with design of 3D models that depict different brain cells affected by the disease. ScienceSoft’s designer used 2D and 3D pictures provided by the Customer as references to create colorful, high-definition, and detailed models.

Once the models were ready and approved by the Customer, the team’s iOS developer proceeded with the implementation of the app’s key functionality.

The AR PoC app developed by ScienceSoft works as follows:

• A user focuses an iPhone/iPad camera on a special AR image code.
• The app recognizes the code, which serves as the command for the 3D models of the disease-affected brain cells to virtually appear on the device screen.
• A user then focuses the device camera on a different AR image code – the one that stands for the admission of a drug researched by the Customer.
• The app, again, recognizes the code, which triggers the effect of the treatment to be shown on the screen: 3D models of brain cells change their forms and colors as they are being cured by the drug.

The fully working PoC was delivered in just 1 month after the Customer’s initial request.

Results

The Customer was very satisfied with both the detailed look of the 3D models and the stable functionality of the augmented reality features. They are currently planning to increase the budget for this project and deliver a fully functioning AR application that would show the effect of their newly found drug in more detail.

Technologies and Tools

Swift, XCode, iOS SDK, ARKit.