Stepping off from the last post, I spent the time looking into different way of augmenting and visualising information in a way we haven’t yet explored at university. This meant doing some research, because we had settled on the idea for Time dilation to be our main idea for development it was important to me to understand the concept in as much detail as I could.
I spent time looking over lectures on YouTube from professors on what exactly time dilation was. The video here is a video from the YouTube channel Sixty Symbols and to me explained Time dilation in a way that I could understand. I continued to spend my time after I had understood the concept looking into way to show time dilation. The GIF below is a 2 dimensional representation of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, This shows well the difference between two objects moving through space, and the relativity difference in time of the two objects. This is was crucial for me in understanding the theory.
Example of time dilation Wiki Link
After this it was important to look at the maths that explains time dilation, we had the idea that showing the maths was important as it meant that the user could explore the idea of time dilation in a mathematical way along with the visual way.
T0 is the time from the observer or you.
T is the time of the observed or the other thing.
C is speed as a percentage of the speed of light.
V is the difference in velocity between the observer and the observed.
So now that I understand the maths it was important to look into different ways of representing the information in a visual way that clearly showed the data and the complex concept we were trying to convey.
I came up with this idea in 2d to show the difference of time dilation between different planets within our solar system. This was because everyone already has a basic understanding of what is going on in the solar system and the massive distances between planets. Time dilation is only really noticed on these large scales so I thought it would be a good way to show the concept to a user who doesn’t have any pre-understanding of the concept.
Time Dilation Mockup. Will Cottrell
When we showed this idea in our crit session it came back to us that the idea of showing time dilation was an interesting one, and the idea that we should look into exploring and taking towards a final project. We also showed the fact that we would like to projection map our idea, this was received well and the feedback was we should take this thinking and expand upon it or find something similar. The concept below is an idea that David had to improve upon our Projection Mapping idea and layout the elements in places that they needed to be for it to work.
UI for Projection Mapping. David Valente
These show a colour and non-colour version of the UI David came up with. this was the sort of thing we had in mind when laying out the concept and project if we were going to go with Projection Mapping.
We decided not go with projection mapping in the end as the Hardware and Software knowledge and limitation were too big for us to over come in our projects time scale. I had recently been playing around with the new ARKit for Unity and Vurforia another Augmented Reality plugin for unity to create some person projects as AR is becoming a new and interesting way for user to interact with locations and technology.
It struck me that this would be a good idea for us to use as my knowledge of unity was good enough that I could produce some decent results in AR already. David and I decided this would be an interesting path to take as the design challenges around creating interfaces for AR are new and there isn’t much out there about designing for AR.
AR UI mockup. David Valente
David went away after we had a decision about what sort of things we could do with Unity. This lead him to producing a mockup of what could be created and how we would have elements places in the augmented world. The AR concept and time dilation was the two things that we decided to stick together and use to integrate together. This was the final idea that we wanted to see through to completion!!
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