During my internship, I designed and developed—alongside two other people—an augmented reality museum experience using the Vuforia SDK in Unity for the Mora de Rubielos Town Hall. The project was part of a cultural initiative aimed at showcasing the history of the castle during its peak, when it was controlled by the Order of the Brothers of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, a Catholic military order that ruled the castle and its surrounding fiefdom.
My main responsibility in the project was making design decisions regarding the implementation of augmented reality, part of the logic programming, and the technical processing of the art, as well as its optimization and adaptation for low-end mobile devices, such as Android and iPhone.
Image of the final museum setup inside the castle.
Modeling and Textures
One of the most important parts of the project was achieving realistic modeling. In this case, we had to replicate the appearance of a knight of the Order of Saint John who would have resided in the Mora de Rubielos castle during the High Middle Ages. For this, we collaborated with a historian who provided the necessary information for accurate reproduction (materials, armor shapes, blazons, etc.). The work was carried out using 3DS Max for modeling and Substance for texturing.
Perhaps one of the most relevant aspects of the modeling was the need to strike a balance between visual realism and performance. The model had to be credible from a historical and aesthetic standpoint, but at the same time, it needed to render at a stable framerate on an average Android device of that time. This involved a conscious optimization effort, controlling the polygon count, the use of normal maps, and texture resolution, as well as proper management of materials and lighting within Unity, with the goal of ensuring a smooth experience without excessively compromising visual fidelity.
T-Pose render of the model with textures applied.
Vuforia and Unity
For the real-time implementation of augmented reality on mobile devices, we chose to use Vuforia integrated into Unity, a decision motivated by its maturity as an SDK and my previous experience working with this technology. This allowed us to speed up the initial prototyping phases and focus on content integration and early-stage validation of the application’s functionality.
Vuforia also offered a robust set of tools for image recognition and target management, which was particularly suitable for a museum context. The image shows a screenshot of an early version of the application running on an Android device, using a provisional target, which served to test tracking stability, real-time performance, and the correct visualization of 3D models before final integration into the castle environment.
Visualization of the model within the application.
This project represented my first encounter with a real development environment, where it was necessary to balance historical rigor with the technical limitations of mobile hardware. The experience allowed me to delve into complete workflows—ranging from optimized modeling and texturing to Unity integration and the use of AR SDKs—while understanding the importance of making technical decisions focused on performance and user experience in cultural and educational contexts.
Below you can find the document where I detail my internship experience in more depth: