An AR maze that turns NCKU’s Banyan Garden into a playable campus legend. Four months, four students across NCKU, walking through a Japanese-colonial ghost story on the real lawn.
Banyan Garden sits at the heart of NCKU’s Guangfu campus. The grass is wide, the trees are old, and the surrounding red-brick walls used to belong to a Japanese colonial army barracks. Students cross it on the way to class. Families picnic on it on weekends. And somewhere underneath, a campus legend says soldiers who never came home still walk the same routines they walked a hundred years ago.
Before we drew a single screen, the four of us spent a Saturday afternoon in the garden with a picnic mat and a notebook. The method was AEIOU (Activities, Environments, Interactions, Objects, Users), but the discipline was just to slow down and watch the place the way the place asks to be watched. No one led the pass; we kept four sets of notes and folded them into one shared list the next morning.
Picnics in the late afternoon. Catch with kids after 3 PM. Running the perimeter. Lying-down was rare; most people stayed semi-active.
Cloudy that day. Old banyan canopy, red-brick perimeter wall, grass bordered by trees. Calm, slow, slightly mysterious.
Small conversation clusters. Families playing games. Groups walking together rather than alone.
Picnic mats and yoga mats. Balls and frisbees, the occasional kite. Bags and phones on the grass, present but quiet.
Students between classes. Parents and small kids. Runners. Older neighbours watching from the benches. A wide mix.
The AEIOU pass produced a list of small observations. We didn’t try to act on all of them. The three with the clearest design consequence read as: what we saw on Saturday → what it asked the game to do on Monday.
Title card. Legend page. The friend’s call for help. Then the maze.
These are the three screens the player meets before the camera lifts and the AR layer lights up. The build front-loads the story so the maze isn’t a puzzle from scratch. By the time you press into the lawn, the legend is already pulling. The splash hands you the mood, the scroll hands you the why, 誠綱 hands you the task. The maze inherits all three.
We were given an open brief to make an AR experience for NCKU. The four of us tossed concepts around for a week. Mine was the one that landed. A real maze on the real lawn, with the campus legend as the through-line. Once the frame was set, the story we’d amplify came together quickly.
In the colonial era, Banyan Garden was a Japanese army training ground; the legend says the soldiers who died here don’t know the war ended, and still drill at dawn along the routes they always marched. 林翊麒 wove these stories that 郭亭妤 had been collecting into a single arc: the player meets 誠綱 near the garden, agrees to help find his missing friend 家豪, and has ten minutes to walk him out of the AR maze.
Every claim below is traceable to a script in the Unity project. The tag at the bottom of each card names the asset that proves it. The principle was simple: nothing in this section is aspirational.
Vuforia’s Plane Finder watches the camera feed and detects the lawn as a flat plane. Once a tap commits the position, the entire maze geometry drops onto that plane at real-world scale. No GPS, no markers — just whatever ground the player is standing on.
Vuforia.PlaneFinderBehaviourWhen the player gets within two metres of 家豪, he starts following. A NavMeshAgent computes a path around the hedge walls in real time, and an Animator switches between idle and walk based on remaining distance.
followAI.cs · NavMeshAgentSeveral story moments fire when two GameObjects come within a threshold distance. Ghost-encounter overlays appear, then fade after three seconds. The Win condition is the same shape: when 家豪 or the player crosses an exit point at < 1 m, the scene loads Victory.
DistanceChecker.cs · ImageVisibility.csYou can’t just walk through the hedge. The first wall touch over half a second triggers a warning overlay. The second wall touch loads Game Over. It rewards careful spatial awareness without being unforgiving to a parent guiding a child.
WallCollision.cs
Four months produced a playable build that anchors on real ground and tells a story. The list below isn’t a list of what we cut. It’s a list of where the work most wants to go next. The things that became clearest only after we had something to walk through.
The current build runs a single mood track for the whole maze. The next version wants ghost whispers and footsteps that come from where they should. Left when the ghost is to your left, fading as you turn away. Unity’s spatialBlend setting is already there; the design work is choosing what each character actually sounds like.
The AEIOU pass kept showing us social clusters: families and friend groups, rarely solo. The next version explores how two devices anchored to the same plane could let two people see each other inside the same maze, hand off the search, take turns being the one who finds 家豪.
Plane Finder works on any ground, which is a virtue. The game runs on any lawn. The next version wants the opposite at the same time: GPS-locked clues that only resolve when you stand near the actual banyan, the actual red brick. The legend is about this place; the puzzle should be about this place too.
The walls are fixed today. The next version wants to remix the geometry between plays so a second visit is recognisably the same garden but a different path. Procedural generation inside a hand-authored frame.
In the garden, classmates and a few curious strangers picked up the tablet and tried to find 家豪. The most interesting part was watching them from outside the screen. They curved their bodies around hedge walls only their device could see.
The fascinating part was watching players from outside the screen. They were avoiding invisible boundaries in the real world. AR wasn’t decorating the space — it was conditioning how people moved through it. — project reflection, Behance 2023
Each of us owned one technical or creative parcel. Mine was the integration role: making the parts fit before the showcase deadline. None of it ships without each of theirs first.
Concept origination · scene integration · build-cycle QA
Vuforia plane-finder integration · story narrative lead · character animation
Ghost animation · game art · campus-legend research and source material
NavMesh AI follow research · all 2D design: UI, presentation deck, exhibition poster, promo film
AR is often pitched as a way to put new things into the world. The part this project kept teaching us was the opposite. AR is also a way to make people notice the place they’re already standing in.
What the player saw was the garden, with the maze drawn into it. The phone wasn’t a screen to vanish into; it was a medium for taking the garden in differently. The design goal was to make the place come forward through the device, not behind it — the cane, in Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, that becomes a sensing organ rather than disappearing in the hand.
The banyan tree visible above the hedge walls. The red-brick wall glimpsed through a gap in the hedge. Real garden details that the device, used well, made more visible. Not less.
This is where 凱硯 went past the brief. The team needed an exhibition poster; he made an A1 print dense enough to become its own document of the work. The two-minute film no one had asked for was the one he wanted to make. The project doesn’t feel like a deliverable in his hands. It feels like a place he had taken the time to fall for.
This project was not made alone. Each person in this picture changed something about the work, and something about me. Looking at the picture now, the strongest thing I feel is thanks.
The 2023 Unity AR build only ran on the iPad we brought to the campus showcase. In 2026 I ported the whole game to Three.js so anyone with a browser can play it. We hope it brings you the same feeling we had back then, walking through 榕園.
Walk into the Banyan Garden and bring 家豪 home.
Open the web build →Desktop only for now — keyboard WASD + mouse-look. Touch controls aren't implemented yet.
