Mendel University researchers attempt to make AR more accessible
The Spatial Design System is a new kind of tool being made by the Spatial Hub team at the Mendel University Faculty of Business and Economics (PEF MENDELU). This cool new gadget is made to make virtual reality technology easier for a lot of people to use. Once mainly used for corporate reasons, virtual and augmented reality has now become an integral part of everyday life. The Spatial Design System, which is being worked on at PEF MENDELU, will be a software library that makes it easy for developers to make apps.
The Spatial Design System has many parts that can be used again and again to make it easier to make 3D games and apps for virtual and augmented reality. These include basic things like buttons, menus, and text boxes, as well as more advanced ones like the ability to snap virtual objects to their real-world versions and make it easier for objects to interact with each other.
This tool is meant to be easy to use; all you need is a simple understanding of web technologies like HTML and JavaScript, which are taught in some grade schools. Ivo Pisařovic, the project leader from the PEF MENDELU Institute of Informatics, says that apps made with this system can run on many different devices, such as regular computers, smartphones, and different kinds of augmented reality glasses. This removes the need for specialist hardware, such as expensive graphics cards or virtual reality helmets. The program is also completely free and open-source, which makes it even easier for people to use.
Mastering standard tools like Unreal Engine or Unity often takes years of training due to their complexity. Pisařovic said that the main problem is that these tools are very complicated and can take years to learn how to use properly for development. Researchers at Mendel University wanted to look into other ways to make virtual and augmented reality apps, even though these tools are still useful for contract research and teaching specialized topics in the Open Informatics program.
Their goal was to get rid of things that got in the way of creativity by making technology more cheap and easy to get to and by creating an atmosphere that encouraged people to try new things. For example, Pisařovic said that this method was like how Arduino worked in robots, Android in smartphones, and Edison’s light bulb. He pointed out that these big steps forward weren’t always the first ones tried in their fields, but they did work by making access more open, which led to broad use and growth in applications.
Augmented reality glasses today already have cameras and other features that let you interact with virtual things in the real world. For instance, mixed reality apps let imaginary things react to their real-world surroundings in real-time. Pisařovic talked about some ways the Spatial Design System could be used, like attaching virtual items to real tables or walls in a room. In games, users can interact with virtual figures that can jump over real furniture. In business applications, production data might be shown as virtual graphs on top of real factory equipment.
Even though the system is already up and running, all of its planned parts should be ready by the end of next year. This big project is supposed to change the way augmented reality is used, giving people new ways to use it in their personal and business lives.
