Bridging Digital and Analogue
Discover how mixed reality and speculative design are revolutionising our understanding of materiality
What did we do?
In collaboration with Berlin's leading universities in art and technology, we developed an interactive platform that delves into the use of sustainable materials through a mixed reality framework. The project blends art, science and speculative design. Merging digital and tactile processes, it provides an unparalleled exploration into the materiality of tomorrow.
What’s new?
What sets this project apart is its creation of a tool that enables users to tangibly interact with the material aspect of a digital object through digital twins that correspond to their tangible equivalents. Through an engaging interaction design, participants could inventively manipulate digital artefacts by exchanging the physical materials from which they were constructed.
How did we do it?
Users were provided with samples of analogue materials. Features of these physical materials were introduced audio-visually via a HoloLens 2 mixed reality headset. The virtual layer was created using the Unreal engine with a custom-built interface to the MR headset. The materials could then be fed into a generator that was equipped with a visual machine learning algorithm to detect the respective materials and translate them into their digital counterparts. The manipulated digital object could be viewed in realtime through the HoloLens.