AR Hwacha

Concept

Bring a historical Korean weapon to life. Designed to be used with Young Modeler's wooden kit (widely available at history museums in South Korea) and run on Android phones, overlay the finished model with the white guide-lines and its arrows appear, ready for you to fire. Information text in the game can be revealed to show historical background behind the weapon.

This was our first foray into AR, using Vuforia with Unity to integrate AR with a physical model to both talk about its original context, and show it in action in a way that we hope might be entertaining and informative, especially for the young audience models like these are often aimed at.

About the Hwacha

The Singijeongi Hwacha (Fire Wagon) is among the oldest rocket weapons in the world with detailed records of its use. The wagon is the world's first mobile rocket type weapon, recorded as being built in 1448. Its body was made of wood, and would launch a multitude of rocket-propelled arrows (singijeon) simultaneously when fired. When firing, the angle of the wagon could be adjusted, and ignition wires could be strung to either launch each row of arrows individually, or launch the entire wagon’s arsenal at once in a devastating flurry.