Categories
AR / VR

Using Amazon Sumerian in Trainings and Classrooms with AWS IAM

In this article, we’ll configure AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to easily use Amazon Sumerian with multiple users. This is especially important for classrooms or trainings. You often don’t want to loose time by having attendees set up and activate their own AWS accounts, including their personal credit cards.

Instead, by setting up sub-users in your account beforehand, you have complete control over the experience and can get started right away. Additionally, it helps with troubleshooting for exercises.

Right now, no ready-made AWS Educate classrooms are available that support Amazon Sumerian. If that changes, the classrooms would be a good alternative, as it gives students their own free AWS credits instead of everything billed to a central account.

Securing Your Account

The first step is making sure you own root account is properly secured. A major part is enabling Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for your root account. Especially when working in teams and with source control, it’s an easy-to-make mistake to upload your credentials somewhere; you don’t want others to have full control over your whole AWS account, as this can incur major charges to your credit card. Therefore, it’s best to enable MFA before you continue.

Categories
Android App Development AR / VR Digital Healthcare

Hit Test & Augmented Reality Anchors with Amazon Sumerian (Part 3)

In an Augmented Reality scene, users looks at the live camera feed. Virtual objects anchor at specific positions of the real world. Our task is to let the user place virtual in the real world. To achieve that, the user simply taps on the smartphone screen. Through a hit test, our script then creates an anchor in the real world and links that to a virtual 3D model entity.

That’s the high level overview. To code this anchoring logic, a few intermediate steps are needed:

  1. Hit Test: converts coordinates of the user’s screen tap and sends the normalized coordinates to the AR system. This checks what’s in the real world at that position.
  2. Register Anchor: next, our script instructs the AR system to create an anchor at that position.
  3. Link Anchor: finally, the ID of the created anchor is linked to our entity. This allows Sumerian to continually update the transform of our 3D entity. Thus, the object stays in place in the real world, even when the user moves around.

Transforming these steps into code, this is what our code architecture looks like. It includes three call-backs, starting with the touch event and ending with the registered and linked AR anchor.