After my first two months of trial by fire at Mimesys my friend and then boss Davy Loots decided to turn up the heat some more. We were going to hell on earth, Las Vegas, to showcase Mimesys on the Intel booth at CES 2019.

In the weeks leading up to this I got to adapt the client-side of Mimesys to make it work for the Magic Leap One AR Headset. At the time unbeknownst to me, this was made even more important since Magic Leap were interested in acquiring our company.

On the left, a look at the Intel booth. Middle, me wearing the Magic Leap One in our booth. Right, someone trying out our holographic colaboration system in the booth.

I also started a rework of the whole interation system inside the application. Since this was still the early years of VR and AR, I had no easy “install XR Toolkit” button that we have nowadays. Starting from what I learned working on my masters project I developed a new interaction system from the ground up. One of the coolest features in this new system was snapping. We could define snap points on objects and make them snap to other snap points.

In the end this is what we decided to feature in the CES demo. Two people would sit in the booth, their backs turned to eachother. The application would start, and the system would start showing the participant’s holograms! This alone was of course a great experience. Then a drone would come flying in between the participants and it would explode into pieces. The two participants would need to work together to rebuild the drone, snapping parts together. Only for it to fly off again once complete.

On the left, the promotional image we made just before CES showing off what it feels like inside the headset. That's me sitting on the left colaborating with Davy as a hologram. On the right, a screenshot from inside the application while someone is rebuilding the drone using the snapping system.