I’m terrible at finishing personal projects once I’ve started. Way back in June I wrote on the blog about an app I was creating called ER3D, with a promise at the end that I was going to release it “soon.” Well, soon turned out to be over six months later, but now you can download and try it yourself.
ER3D
Euler Rotations in 3-Dimensions
The Latest Updates
The big update I made since that post was to transition from SceneKit to RealityKit. For the layman, these are both 3D rendering frameworks provided by Apple in XCode, but the latter is more modern and is targeted towards Augmented Reality (AR) and Extended Reality (XR), with special focus on the Vision Pro headset. For now, I’m just targeting iPhone, which you can see in the video below where I switch to AR mode in front of the Guggenheim in Bilbao.
My original design intent was to aid in teaching the yaw-pitch-roll sequence, which is one that we use all the time in aerospace for describing the orientation of planes … and other things. Think of yaw like the direction your plane is pointing on a map, pitch being the extent that it is tilted up or down, and roll as how much it is banking into a turn. You can, in fact, define any orientation in 3D based on a combination of these properties.
The 3-1-3 Sequence and Blender Physics
I also added a spinning top model, used to teach the 3-1-3 sequence, or procession, nutation, and spin. That one is convenient for defining the orientation of a satellite or a gyroscope, among other things. I created the .usdz model of the gyroscope in Blender, and in process experimented with its physics simulation tool. The video below is one of my renders, before I exported the model to use it in my RealityKit app.
Through playing around a bit with the physics engine in Blender, I came away with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it did in fact produce “gyro-like” behaviors, such as righting itself into an upright position once its angular momentum was sufficiently high, and processing around the vertical axis. On the other hand, Blender didn’t give me access to many properties I would find necessary for a true engineering tool, like precise control over mass properties, or giving initial values for velocity terms. Still, it was a fun little exercise as I build up my Blender skillset.
Wrapping Up
So there you have it, another AR app in the books to add to my iOS and RealityKit portfolio. I hope you download it from the App Store and give it a try, and if you love it, make sure to leave a review. Also, if you’re especially interested, here are a few more links:
- The ER3D GitHub page contains the source code for the project, which you can view and even contribute to if you like.
- A product page that I created on this site.
- The landing page that I created with a screenshot and features.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the new app!