2024
AR Motherboard App
A university project that was my first real endeavour into mixed reality, Unity and building for the Meta Quest 3.
The overarching concept for this project could be boiled down to 8 words: "analyse a surface to reveal its hidden qualities".
In my case, I chose a motherboard as my surface after looking around for some interesting ones, and finding the innards of a computer after looking through its fan/vents.
Taking the brief more literally, I decided it would be cool to make something that explains a motherboard surface, as its usually something that remains hidden due to the technical barrier and seclusion inside a computer.
I began researching into motherboards, what they did, how they worked, what kinds there were, and settled that my basis would be the ATX motherboard - one of the most popular and commonly found versions.
And since this project had no real restriction regarding process, I decided to take a leap of faith and see what I could do using 3D and mixed reality, as it was something I'd wanted to get involved in, but didn't really have the facilities or opportunity to.
This was probably one of the most important decisions I've made, in all honesty.
The first thing I did was model a simplified motherboard in Blender based on my research.
The second thing was to then navigate the uncharted waters of Unity and the Meta Quest 3.
My concept for the app itself was to create a tutorial app that led a user through the motherboard, ultimately to teach using this medium of mixed reality, as I had seen a few other AR overlay demos out there which did a similar thing.
As the app got fleshed out, I added in outlines to the board, and made it so that it could be grabbed naturally by hand, and expanded outwards and inwards gesturally.
This resulted in a very intuitive UX which interfered as little as possible with the whiz slideshow through how a motherboard functions.
The final app is also up on App Labs in the Meta Quest store for free, so be sure to try it if you have one!
download on Meta Store
This project was showcased at the GMD "CMYK" exhibition held in June 2024 at London College of Communication