VoxelCO- Playing with Collaborative Objects

.socially.augmented.fuzzy.formations

Status

Inter-(meta)active Stage / Research / Academia / Teaching
Festival Stage, Collaborative Objects Research
Fifteen Seconds Festival 2019, Graz

Date

2019

Professor

Alexander Grasser

Collaboration

Alexandra Parger (NanaDesign), Anna Brunner (Fifteen Seconds)

VoxelStage Tutors:

Alexander Grasser, Alexandra Parger, Eszter Katona, Kristijan Ristoski

VoxelStage Students:

Bajric, Dostovic, Imsirovic, Josic, Kolasinac, Milkic, Dizarevic, Jäger, Kelava, Marjanovic, Ren, Salkovic, Smajlovoic, Vujovic, Rigler, Backenköhler. @ Institute of Architecture and Media, TU Graz

Publication

“Towards an Architecture of Collaborative Objects”

full paper at ECAADE SIGRADI 2019 Porto

Exhibition

“VoxelCO - Playing with Collaborative Objects”
project at ‘Artificial Realities: Virtual as an Aesthetic Medium for Architectural Ideation’
Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2019

“ VoxelCO explores the potential of playing with Collaborative Objects in real, augmented and mixed realities, proposing an architecture of socially augmented fuzzy formations. ”

To support engaging with collaborative objects, the multi-player platform application VoxelCO was developed. A cross platform App that allows to collaboratively design aggregated voxel formations on PC and Mobile devices. Furthermore it’s a platform to explore the potential of social augmented reality to interact with real and virtual objects and people. Rather than focusing on high precision, that HMD’s could provide for augmented reality, VoxelCO is aimed to be highly accessible through developing it for widely diffused mobile devices. To engage with the objects on multiple realities, different playgrounds were introduces: digital-, augmented- and real playgrounds. To play the game, players start the VoxelCO App and connect to the ‘Digital Playground’. Once players are Online they can instantiate Voxels to a shared persistent digital playground. Together they can aggregate voxel formations, save and share them. To further engage more with the voxel formations, as well as to get a feeling of scale, resolution and density, players can explore their design in augmented reality in real scale on their mobile devices. They can start a new design in a collaborative session at the ‘Augmented Playground’, where multiple players can instantiate in real-time new voxels to the shared playground to explore their spacial implications and qualities. To further investigate the potentials of VoxelCO, metal wire-cubes were used as building blocks to test the socially aggregated voxel formations at the ‘Real Playground’.
Through collaborative play, a group of 20 students designed with VoxelCO the case study project: VoxelStage.