Shenandoah VR Design Students Help Bring Bestselling Author’s Graphic Novel To Life

Two students in Shenandoah University’s Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality Design program have created an AR companion app for a graphic novel written by New York Times bestselling author Wendy Mass, helping bring to life the story of a 12-year-old girl who is introduced to the wonders of VR.

“Lo and Behold” follows Addie, who has found it difficult to see life’s possibilities since her family was turned upside down. When her father’s summer job takes them across the country, Addie makes a new friend and gets caught up in an exciting project that involves VR and prompts her to see the world in whole new ways.

Artwork by Gabi Mendez illustrates Addie’s adventures throughout the graphic novel, and the AR experience built by Shenandoah University students Daniel Sheil ’24 and Luke Yager ’25 make Mendez’s work truly come alive. Using the “Lo and Behold” AR app, readers can scan individual pages of the book using the camera on a smartphone or tablet, launching 3D animation that appears on top of the scanned page.

Development of the AR companion app began as a class project in the AR Design and Programming (ARVR 462) course taught by Mohammad Obeid, Ph.D., director of Shenandoah’s Bachelor of Science in Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality Design program and co-director of the Shenandoah Center for Immersive Learning (SCiL). Mass, who discovered SCiL on a visit to Shenandoah University’s main campus in Winchester, Virginia, while her daughter was exploring her college options, reached out to Dr. Obeid and fellow SCiL Co-Director Nathan Prestopnik, Ph.D., last spring about her plan to incorporate AR technology into “Lo and Behold.” and Obeid provided the means to bring that idea to fruition through his class.

The app is currently in beta testing and will be released later in 2024.

I had the chance to use it and it’s so great! They were able to integrate some 3D assets that I already had, and made up awesome ones of their own. Truly, it is so professional and so much better than I ever could’ve imagined. I am very grateful! I believe it will add another dimension of immersion into the book, and will allow people to really see the impact AR and VR can have in our lives.”

New York Times bestselling author Wendy Mass, on the “Lo and Behold” AR companion app

To develop the AR experience, Sheil and Yager first created an image library of pages of the novel that, when scanned, would prompt the generation of associated 3D animation. ARKit, an application programming interface, is used to detect whether or not the camera is looking at an image from the library, and uses the image as a reference point in 3D space to allow for real-time tracking. The AR program recognizes individual images, allowing Sheil and Yager to spawn objects to specific pages of the novel.

Throughout the app’s development, Sheil was responsible for coding, user interface creation, asset integration and animation, while Yager handled prototype creation, 3D modeling, texturing and animation.

“Working with Wendy Mass on this project has been a blast,” Yager said. “Augmented reality is a fascinating new world of technology with a ton of potential, so I am honored to be able to work with this technology together with my classmate Daniel Sheil.”

To learn more about “Lo and Behold” or other works by Mass, visit wendymass.com.