Web app for a 3D tour in Unity through Facebook Places using GPS.

This is a project that I developed for the Multimedia Design and Production course at the University of Florence during my Bachelor Degree in Computer Engineering. The assignment required to map a chosen type of data extracted from a social network and in a 3D environment in Unity. I chose to create a coordinate-based and explorable 3D world and to populate it with 3D marks that stands for Facebook Places, enabling a player to navigate into the world and interact with them.

The implementation of the solution is the following: the user is enabled to control the player (make it walk, run or jump) through the keyboard arrows and can interact with a place just clicking on it. A pop-up will then appear with place-related information and a link to the correspondent Facebook page.

In order to retrieve places information it was used the Facebook API Place Graph, making a query for the nearest places in a radius of 5km.

• Places have been modeled with Sketchup in order to obtain a 3D object that represents faithfully a traditional place icon used in maps.
• Each place is permanently in rotation on its vertical axis, in order to be recognizable from every direction.
• Each place has a text label with its name on top.

The relevance of the place is predetermined according to number of checkins nc and the average number of ratings r from the Facebook users. A scale factor is applied to the place 3D object following these rules:

For displaying the map on the ground with satellites images it was used the asset Google Go Maps from the Unity Store. This gave the possibility to avoid the implementation details of a web mercator projection at all. The conversion between real polar coordinates and cartesian coordinates on the plane is accomplished by the asset.

• Refresh: permits to reloads places from the current position.
• Home: teleport the player to the initial position (marked with a green down arrow).
• Set Position: teleport the player to a specific position (lat, lon).

• Enable/disable places of a specific category.
• Useful in highly concentrated zones.
• Places requests handled with priority for visible categories.

• Compass: to specific user orientation in the real world.
• Current Position: latitude and longitude.
• Mini Map: eagle-eye camera that follows the player.

• Tommaso Scarlatti
• Simone Magistri

Licensed under the term of MIT License. See attached file LICENSE.