Goal

“The goal of this challenge is to explore the design possibilities for creating a virtual engineering space that will offer new opportunities for engineers and scientist to interface with their a virtual clean room. You are tasked with creating a spatial intervention for the clean room. Your end user will be a mechanical engineer on the Mars 2020 mission at JPL” -Project Design Brief

Overview

Considering that we’ve never been in a clean room, never philosophized about space, and never remotely close to being astronauts, we were out of our element on what to do for this project. I think the professor and the Immersive Visualization Producer from JPL who had tasked us this project were really hoping that we’d take advantage of all the complexities of Hololens and all the nuances associated with creating vehicles meant to go to space but that would have required way more research than we had time for. It also didn’t help that some of the obvious/low hanging fruit hadn’t been done yet.

While others came up with flower clocks and manifestos, as a group we were rooted in the practical and looked for an idea that would definitely be used in an engineer’s process of using the clean room. One of the things we latched onto during our discussions with the JPL Producer is that there’s a lot of long tedious training surrounding the clean room, especially with the bunny suit. And if there’s any point to new technology, it’s to make long and tedious tasks easier. Teaching how to put on the bunny suit was ideal because the changing room was small enough for everything to easily be seen with the Hololens and there were a reasonable number of parts we needed to replicate as 3D models.

The final product is one part a game, and one part an instructional video. The user goes through the process of putting on a bunny suit with a guide explaining what’s happening and why each step is important. For redundancy, parts are labeled, and instructions are a part of the HUD.