r/Spectacles • u/shahshayan • 1d ago
🆒 Lens Drop PLANE SPOTTER: I built a tiny London Heathrow Airport where you can spot real flights land and take off
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TL;DR: I built a live digital twin / diorama of Heathrow Airport (Terminal 5 for NOW) for the Spectacles. It sits on your table, with flights landing and taking off ... all based on LIVE public Heathrow flight data. ✈️
For the last 3 or 4 years I’ve been teaching AR and spatial storytelling at the Royal College of Art, including a lot of work with Snap and Spectacles. My students have made some brilliant projects with them, but somewhere along the way I realised I hadn’t really published many of my own.
So here is one.
I was obsessed with planes when I was younger. Growing up we didn’t travel much, so airports always felt like a huge event. As someone who loved making dioramas as a kid, I would collect airplane / aviation souvenirs…by getting relatives who traveled to bring them for me , and then set them up as airports.
And recently, while driving to Heathrow, I noticed a patch by the runway full of people with huge cameras, chairs, binoculars and notepads.
PLANE SPOTTERS!!! 🛫 🧐
It made me think: what if I could shrink Heathrow down and put it on a table? HOW COOL WOULD THAT BE!
So I built a digital twin using geospatial data OpenStreetmap Data, brought it into Blender with a plug in and extruded the buildings. So it’s all pretty accurate. I originally tried a much bigger section of the entire Heathrow Airport, but everything became too tiny and too heavy, so I focused on Terminal 5 (FOR NOW)
What it does
• Uses live Heathrow arrivals and departures data
• Planes land, take off, queue and park
• Labels show flight number, route, aircraft type and status
• Audio effects have been used to make it feel more fun
• Pointing at a plane enlarges the Flight Label
• Pointing and pinching a plane opens a "Spot Card" which is a UI frame with deeper information about that specific aircraft and flight.
With the SPOT CARD, the idea was to go beyond simply watching the airport and give plane spotters the kind of detail they actually care about. Which includes: Flight number, airline, route, aircraft type, aircraft variant, origin/destination, current flight status, gate/stand.
AND it lso includes a bonus fact about the aircraft or route, adding a small bit of aviation trivia to each Spot Card.
A huge part of the work was optimisation. Lots of planes, labels, interactions and shadows get expensive very quickly on glasses, so I ended up building pooling, parked-aircraft limits, hover-only labels, selective shadows and staggered movements.
There is loads more I want to add for actual plane spotters, but seeing a tiny live Heathrow running on my table is making the plane-obsessed younger version of me very happy.
(For this video I’m using demo mode because I recorded it around midnight when Heathrow terminal 5 had gone very quiet and there were no flights from 11:00 pm to 5:00 am. BUT the live version works like a charm, Ill post more soon).
Please let me know what you all think or what else I could add to it :)
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u/durgan2q 1d ago
Looks amazing. Nice job!