So first off I’m going to address the elephant in the room. If anyone outside of my teacher or classmates reads this they’re going to have no idea what The Catalyst is. So, before you dive in to the body of this article I’ll give you a brief rundown on The Catalyst. The Catalyst building is the new home for Eastern Washington Universities new home for STEM programs, like the program I’m currently in. It was finished last September and theoretically would have been in use for the entirety of this academic year if it wasn’t for Covid-19, fun. Anyway, this isn’t just a normal building. The Catalyst is a state of the art cutting edge building, standing as Spokane’s first zero energy building and with state of the art labs stands to be a leader in the cutting edge of technology in the region. Now that you have brief understanding of the Catalyst building lets get into the guts of this article. World effects and how they’ll be used in the Catalyst.
World Effects
World effects, are quite simply AR effects that would transform someone's reality, through the use of rear facing camera’s. One great example of world effects is Amazon’s AR view. This allows users to project appropriately proportioned 3D objects in real time to any selected location to get an almost lifelike view of how a space would look with a given object in it. There are two ways that this can be achieved. One ways is by moving an object from camera space, into world space. If an object is in world space, you can set it to be in a fixed location in someone’s environment. Alternatively you can create a world effect with a plane tracker. Camera space has the AR object connected to the device it is projecting from. So in camera space if you were to move your phone your projected object would move in unison to that. World space is when the object is in world space it is no longer a child of the camera and thusly when the camera is moved, the object stays in place. It is worth noting that only a mobile device with a gyroscope can employ the use of world effects. While this article is not directly related to AR it does give a great rundown on world space, a bit heavy on the math for my liking but good nonetheless.
The plane tracker method relies on the camera of the device locating a horizontal plane which it will then pin your 3D object to the plane that your camera has located. It looks identical to an object in world space but operates on a different basis. Similar to the plane tracker is the target tracker. While the plane tracker activates while looking at any plane, the target tracker will only activate the effect while looking at an object in the real-world. It operates incredibly similar to how scanning a QR code triggers the opening of a URL. The item that triggers a target tracker is known as a target marker. Target markers can vary in shape and size, they can be images of varying designs as well as 3D objects.
In the Catalyst
Now that, we’ve got a decent overview of how world effects work lets look at the possibilities this can serve in the Catalyst. The first thing that comes to mind is not Catalyst specific but could be applied at any university is related to target tracking. Each professor has their own set of office hours, and depending on the professor those office hours could be hard to locate. If you had an target attached to that professors nameplate then it could pull up an AR copy of the instructors office hours. Gone would be the days of going to the school registry, then the specific colleges registry, and then that departments registry . Aside from classes like emergent design the use of AR world effects cant greatly assist the design department as a whole, but that is not so for the other departments. The engineering department could greatly benefit from the use of world effects. As far as I know the engineering department does not design and build bridges as part of their curriculum, but with the use of AR technology they can simulate designs for large scale real world applications. With world effects they can create real to life replicas without any concern for physical size and project it using an AR compatible device. Imagine being able to interact with the structural model of a skyscraper using the likes of a HoloLens. The uses of world effects for both practical as well as educational purposes inside the catalyst, as well as other places is practically limitless. The technology is ready and waiting so the only limit is the imagination.