Event staging in augmented reality

The event staging, before it is built

The scene is the setup at the size it will be built, standing on the ballroom's real floor. The buyer walks between the stage and the tables, sees the screens playing video, and immediately understands whether the setup fits, how it reads from the back row and how close the podium sits. Switching to a different complete scenario is one gesture, so comparing three proposals stops costing three builds.

Every object is edited live: rotate it, scale it, change its color or remove it, from a catalog that runs from podiums and chairs to screens and lighting rigs. And since no two ballrooms measure the same, the entire scene moves, rotates and scales as one piece to fit, as the documentation puts it, practically any exhibition room.

For the sale there is a client mode: the operator prepares the scene, the visitor stands on a circle marked on the floor, and from there the experience is driven by the operator through voice commands while the visitor just looks and walks. The handover is designed so the headset changes heads without the visitor ever touching a menu.

Saving scenes on a headset that saved nothing

The most sellable feature was also the one the hardware did not allow. The work of fitting a setup to a specific ballroom is only worth it if it can be saved and loaded on the next visit, and on the first-generation headset everything placed was lost when it powered off. For this application there was no save that survived the power cycle.

The only thing the team found that did survive were the crash logs. The solution lives in that sentence: the save feature concatenates the positions, rotations and scales of the whole scene into a string, forces a controlled crash so the system writes it into the crash log, and on the next boot finds that log, parses it and rebuilds the scene object by object. On the outside it is three slots with voice commands, "Save One", "Load One". Underneath it is a use of crash logs the manufacturer never imagined, and it is why the documentation could promise that scenes load "even after the HoloLens has been turned off".

The other limit was memory: 2 GB of RAM for the whole headset, and scenarios carrying a stage, screens, furniture and even a display car. It fit through heavy decimation of every model: cutting each object's geometry down to where the silhouette still held, because at real scale what convinces is proportion.

The logos, without touching the headset

The provider operates in different hotels every week, so the brands inside the scene could not be baked into the application. The answer was a web portal, built by Fyware, with ten logo slots the headset downloads over HTTP: change the logo on the portal and the day's setup already wears it, without plugging the headset into a computer or reinstalling anything. Another ten offline logos stay as a fallback for when there is no network, which in a convention basement is more common than it sounds.

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