A Week of XR at MIT Media Lab
Another year and another amazing hackathon at the MIT Media Lab. The organizing team did an amazing job making this latest edition of Reality Virtually their best one yet. The team invited over four-hundred people around the world to attend this year’s hackathon. The attendees had diverse backgrounds ranging from students and researchers to medical professionals and CEOs. For five days, the attendees worked in small teams to tackle problems in social good, mobility and communications, health and wellness, art, media and entertainment, games and learning, productivity, and industrial and commercial.
The hackathon started off with a full day of workshops to help the attendees learn new skills. Topics ranged from introduction to A-Frame to introduction to Unity. After the day of workshops, everyone was gathered together to pitch ideas and form teams.
The second day was the start of the hackathon, where teams worked on their ideas for the next ~50 hours. An interesting concept that came up during the hackathon was popup workshops. A lot of teams had common questions that mentors kept answering multiple times. The popup workshops allowed mentors to teach the teams what they knew. This ranged from developing 3D models in blender to advanced Unity. And with the diverse backgrounds of the attendees, a few attendees taught popup workshops.
The organizing team did a really good job recruiting sponsors, which provided every team with the hardware and software they needed to succeed in this hackathon. On the hardware side, there was plenty of Magic leap headsets, Oculus headsets and HTC Vive headsets. Alienware also provided some beefed up desktops to power all the headsets. And Microsoft gave out a couple hundred of HP mixed reality headsets to the attendees for free. On the software side, there was PTC’s Vuforia, Autodesk’s VR/AR toolkit and WayRay’s AR SDK.
As a member of the Samsung Internet team, I was mostly interested in projects built with the WebXR/WebVR APIs. There were a few WebXR projects (built with A-Frame) that I will highlight below.
AccessibleLocomotionWebXR
AccessibleLocomotionWebXR’s goal is to make immersive experiences available to those who are affected by quadriplegia. These users would not be able to use their hands or fingers to interact with the immersive experience. The team built a binary controller component for A-Frame to interact with and to navigate a VR world.
As a result, the team won Wayfair’s Way-more award and the best application for accessibility award.
The team plans on submitting this to the A-Frame framework.
gARden Cards
Another A-Frame project, gARden Cards allows people to collaboratively create a get well card in VR/AR for a recipient. The immersive get well card contains messages, audio recordings and a virtual garden. There is also an option to print out a physical card, which contains an AR-Marker that the user can scan to display their virtual messages.
The gARden Cards team won the best MR award.
TerraformAR
TerraformAR allows people experience the damaging effects of climate change on the planet. The team accomplished this by building a custom AR overlay on top of A-Frame and Three.js to display ecological data on a map. There is also a feature to view the effects in first person.
You can try out the project here.
You can see the list of winners here and all of the projects here.
This is my second time mentoring the hackathon and I can’t wait until the next one!
AR in Action
Earlier in the week was the AR in Action (ARIA) conference. This was my second time attending the conference and the first time I was able attend the talks. This was a great opportunity to see what the community is doing to push the boundaries of XR and see which industries are adopting XR.
The conference had very interesting talks, ranging from Magic Leap talking about their Helio browser and Prismatic.js API to learning how to DJ by with a real teacher in VR. My favorite talk was Mark Spitzer’s talk on foveated rendering for rendering VR experiences to improve performance.
I highly recommend attending the next ARIA whether you are new to XR or if you an XR veteran. ARIA has talks for everyone.
