OurLab - Mixed Reality Lab Designer
This project demonstrates the feasibility of embedding requirements into a mixed reality platform by integrating rule-based constraints, allowing users to design a space and immediately know the impact of changes as they make them.
The platform, OurLab, integrates a range of mixed reality technologies and systems such as hand tracking, fiducial markers, and a tangible user interface. By moving physical, tracked objects around, a designer can explore potential lab configuration solutions that comply to given requirements. The platform analyses the design as it is occuring and reflects requirement compliance in real-time to the user.
This platform is currently being evaluated through user studies, looking at how different fidelities of visualisation immediate feedback can impact a design process, for better or worse.
People
Lee Kent
Research Engineer
Chris Snider
Lecturer
Ben Hicks
Professor, Director
Blog Posts
UK-Colombia collaboration and WUN bid submission
I returned to visit la Universidad de Los Andes (Uniandes) in August this year after a pandemic induced hiatus. Prior to 2020, we had been working with Uniandes to develop proposals to do with agritech and transdisciplinary engineering. During the pandemic we were able to manage some collaboration through project clean access (leading to a […]
21st Century Prototyping exhibit at ICED 2023
Setting the stage to show the community our technical capabilities and upcoming research, this week the 21CP team exhibited a range of demos at the ICED 2023 conference! We had three sets of demos up and running for attendees to try: Design in VR: Aman led the charge with a demo showing the different ways […]
IDEA challenge 2023
The IDEA challenge returned in May 2023 for its third iteration! This time it was hosted by the University of Zagreb and building on the success of the the challenge’s first two iterations was set to be bigger and better than ever! The challenge saw teams working fully virtually to develop a CubeSat satellite that […]
21st Century Prototyping at the ProSquared Network+ Launch
This week Chris and the team joined the launch event for the new ProSquared Network on the Democratisation of Digital Devices. This 5-year network aims to connect industry and academia to find new ways to overcome production barriers at lower volumes, by making design, prototyping, and manufacture faster and more efficient. Doing so will be […]
DMF @ DCC’22
The DMF attended the tenth International Conference on Design Cognition and Computing (DCC’22) in Glasgow and received the best poster prize and runner up in the best paper award!
Technical Debt – No Time To Pay
In recent years there has been a lot of talk about technical debt in various fields. Technical debt is the cost that an individual or a group of people will incur in future for hasty decisions in the present, which are often motivated by lack of resources and/or time. Photo by Scott Umstattd on Unsplash […]
Facemask to Filament: 3D Printing with Recycled Facemasks
Photography courtesy of Peter Rosso As a first line of defence against the spread of COVID-19 the facemask, a simple covering worn to reduce the spread of infectious agents, has affected the lives of billions across the globe. An estimated 129 billion facemasks are used every month, of which, most are designed for single use. […]
Demystifying Digital “X” – ICED Conference Paper
The DMF lab recently (remotely) attended the International Conference of Engineering Design (ICED) 2021 to present seven papers. One of these, authored by Chris Cox, Ben Hicks and James Gopsill, investigates the new language surrounding the paradigm shift towards digital engineering. This presentation was shown at ICED 2021 as part of the “Digital Twins” panel, […]
Revisiting prototyping in 2020: A snapshot of practice in UK Design Companies
Prototyping is an indispensable activity in the product development process but what does prototyping practice in industry look like? In this video we take a ‘snapshot’ of prototyping practice from 5 companies to see how practice has evolved and understand what the characteristics of industrial practices are. This work was presented at the International Conference […]