Spatial computing devices that blend virtual and real worlds have the potential to soon become ubiquitous. Yet, creating experiences for spatial computing is non-trivial and needs skills in programming and 3D content creation, rendering them inaccessible to a wider group of users. We present SpatialProto, an in-situ spatial prototyping system for lowering the barrier to engage in spatial prototyping. With a depth-sensing capable Mixed Reality headset, SpatialProto lets users record animated objects of the real-world environment (e.g. paper, clay, people or any other prop), extract only the relevant parts, and directly place and transform these recordings in their physical environment. We describe the design and implementation of SpatialProto, a user study evaluating the system’s prototype with non-expert users (𝑛 = 9), and demonstrate applications where multiple captures are fused for compelling Augmented Reality experiences.

Publication

Leon Müller, Ken Pfeuffer, Jan Gugenheimer, Sarah Prange, Bastian Pfleging and Florian Alt. SpatialProto: Using Real-World Captures for Rapid Prototyping of Mixed Reality Experiences. In Proceedings of the 2021CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI'21. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. [Download Bibtex]