Night Tour of Taihe Lake

Overview

Night Tour of Taihe Lake is a nighttime cultural AR walking experience built for the Qingtian government along the shores of Taihe Lake in Zhejiang. Visitors walk the lakeside trail and encounter AR moments tied to local heritage — glowing rice fish, ancient grasshopper boats, and a playful nod to Qingtian's most famous diaspora son, Jensen Huang. As solo technical lead with Chance 3D, I built the entire technical platform for the activation: the spatial map, the AR runtime, the cross-device delivery layer, and on-site operations through the launch window. Chance 3D led the cultural narrative, creative design, and the storytelling beats along the trail.

Official media confirmed it as Lishui Municipality's first XR cultural-tourism deployment. During the Lantern Festival, the platform handled around 3,000 visitors in a single day with roughly 14,200 total interactions, and the project went on to receive multiple regional industry awards in the metaverse and cultural-tourism categories.

What I Built

• WebAR architecture. A browser-based AR runtime using 8th Wall — install-free entry through QR scan, instant access for any visitor with a phone.
• Spatial mapping. On-site capture sessions along the Taihe Lake trail, followed by Immersal map construction and tuning to ensure positioning lock held under nighttime lighting conditions. Multiple site visits for positioning validation across every story beat.
• Rokid AR glasses integration. The same content pipeline was adapted to run on Rokid's consumer AR glasses as a premium experience layer alongside the phone WebAR volume channel.
• On-site operations. Live deployment support through the Lantern Festival peak, including hands-on troubleshooting during the high-density activation window.

Technical Solutions

• Immersal + 8th Wall + Three.js — a stack with no precedent. At the time of delivery I could find no public example of these three systems combined. Immersal provided the visual SLAM and persistent spatial maps needed to anchor content reliably across dozens of metres of outdoor trail. 8th Wall delivered the browser-based runtime. Three.js gave me full control over the rendering of each cultural moment. The solo R&D challenge was making them hand off cleanly in a nighttime outdoor environment where lighting, motion, and crowd density all stress AR pipelines.
• Nighttime SLAM calibration. Outdoor spatial maps built for daytime conditions fail at night. I tuned the Immersal map specifically for the low-light, high-contrast conditions of the lakeside trail, testing across multiple evening sessions before the launch window.
• Cross-device delivery. Architecting for two radically different rendering targets — browser WebAR on ordinary smartphones and dedicated AR glasses — from a single content pipeline is the kind of structural decision that determines whether a multi-device XR activation coheres or feels stitched together.

Why It Matters

Cultural-tourism AR usually trades scale for fidelity, or fidelity for scale. This activation refused that trade — anchoring outdoor experiences with proper SLAM mapping, delivering them install-free through the browser, and supporting next-generation AR-glasses hardware on the same backbone. That combination is what turned it into a regional first, put it in front of 3,000 visitors on a single night, and left it as a piece of Lishui's cultural-tourism landscape that is still cited today.