I’ve played with a variety of Augmented Reality (AR) peripherals – among them the Hololens and the Tango. This has resulted in a variety of “sketches” as I learned different interfaces.

I’m hardly the only one to try this, but the experience of looking at stacked medical CT scans and seeing a volumetric rendition of the human body you can stick your head inside is amazing – bones, tissue, organs, even the scanning equipment can be reconstructed and looked at in a way the even the best 2D display cannot compete with.

I created a version of Conway’s Game of Life in 3 dimensions for the Hololens – easy enough to program but always a challenge to display on non-immersive displays (I paralleled this development with a 1D Game of Life I made for the Atari 2600 – I try to be versatile with platforms).

ShadowSculpt was created during a weekend game jam, and features an apparently random set of cubes whose shadows formed a distinct image – a nod to artists like Tim Noble and Sue Webster. The user can draw their own image, and have it “encrypted” in the cubes.

“Statue Garden” was created during another game jam for the Tango – I incorporated non-photoreal rendering, applying it to surrounding the Tango saw as it scanned the room. The Tango was one of the first devices I used that could not only track user position, but detect physical objects. This works great for finding walls and furniture, but in a crowded room of a game jame, it also produced partial scans of people, whose resulting meshes looked like old statues with the odd missing part. With that in mind, I applied a painterly texture to the walls, furniture, and odd person that the ongoing scans captured, allowing a “magic window” into a space that reflected the physical surroundings in an abstracted manner. The user could also paint on the walls and “statues” that formed.