Project:ING

The idea for this project was to bring out the core features of a specific exhibit - in our case, the Laterna Magica, a device developed around 1650, which set the foundation for our modern-day projectors. It was capable of projecting colorful images onto a 2D surface. In our application however, the user finds themselves in a simple environment, giving them nothing but a sense of space. Using a digital recreation of the Laterna Magica, they can project a full 3D environment into their space to explore and interact with. By swapping cartridges, the user can alter the content projected by the lantern, allowing them to explore a variety of different worlds.
This application was designed to be a room scale VR experience in a museum exhibition of the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, which is dedicated to film history and also features the story of the Laterna Magica in its permanent exhibition. The goal of this project was to develop an experience which is simple enough for older people and VR-inexperienced visitors, yet impressive enough to also be appealing to younger and rather museum-disinterested people in order to get people more excited about museum exhibitions again.

In this project, I was mainly responsible for managing the team, setting up version control, documenting our progress and developing a shader for our core mechanic. Furthermore, I assisted in Unity / C# development, for example by updating the project to the latest version of the "XR Interaction Toolkit" or fixing bugs.
As part of this project, I expanded my knowledge of shaders in Unity and Unity Shadergraphs in order to create a shader that meets our needs. After setting up our git repository on GitHub, I introduced the rest of the team to using and utilizing git properly and helped them out whenever they had any questions or problems regarding it. I also made sure that our repository kept looking clean and organized throughout the entire development process.
The team worked on research, ideation and concept development in equal parts.

My Contributions to this Project

Research, Idea & Concept

UX Design & User Guidance

Implementation in Unity3D

Shaders (Unity Shadergraph)

Project Management

Version Control Maintenance

Image Gallery

Close-up of the laterna magica

Lifeless Blockout (left) and projected steampunk environment (right)

Projection cone is determined by the laterna magica

Objects in a projected world may appear "cut off" due to the projection cone

The dull but warm atmosphere of the steampunk city

Some objects have blockout representation, some only exist in the projection

View of the houses at the steampunk plaza

Projection of a cold, cyberpunk-esque city

Cross-section between blockout and projected world

This experience has been developed by Daniel Heilmann, Julius Faust and Yanina Koulakovski under the premise “Hidden ventures beyond the spotlight” during winter term 2021/22 as a semester project for the Expanded Realities study course at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences.