TLDR:
Would you like to take a trip down memory lane? Immerse yourself in a world where memories are finite and precious. Our XR app transforms everyday objects into capsules, each containing a unique, finite story. Watch memories unfold, listen to narrations, and experience the magic as these stories gradually dissipate with each viewing. With RFID-enabled capsules, any small object can hold not just a story, but emotions and significance. Elevate the value of your memories in an unforgettable way.
Intro
Living in an era of heightened disconnection, catalyzed by technology, our screens paradoxically isolate us from ourselves and others. Our busy lives often neglect embodied connections, which jeopardizes our health, mental and physical well-being, increasing risk for numerous diseases such as diabetes, depression and anxiety, addiction, heart diseases, dementia. While existing solutions rooted in digital photographic exchange strive to connect us worldwide, they distance us from embodied and multisensory connections. Using Mixed Reality approach to sharing we enable proven methods of human connection and introduce new modalities to expand through XR.
Our busy lives are continuously choosing convenience and abstraction over human connection. Everything continues to converge into a tiny 6.1” screen. But with this all powerful device we still choose to use photobooths, cherish notes, and save souvenirs, despite knowing these items won’t last forever. While digitizing the world around us, we have lost something in what it means to own an object and share them with others. Memory Lane is a way to reimagine connection in the future that brings the joy, and serendipity of sharing with others, taking advantage of new digital mediums, and enabling connection through creation and shared exchange.
Memory Lane allows us to imbue physical objects with spatial multimedia that can be played back by the receiver. However, there is a catch. Much like physical objects, your digital layer will slowly dissolve with each playback through degenerative A.I. until eventually it is unrecognizable. Once depleted, objects can be rewritten with new digital layers, ready to be shared once again.
Process
Participants begin by selecting an item of their choice and adding a unique ID tag to it. The item is then placed onto our memory station to imbue the object with a digital memory. Participants use their mixed reality headsets to create a spatial multimedia experience around the object. This can include photos, videos, audio, 3D painting, 3D objects and more. Once complete, the memory is tied to the physical object and ready to be shared. The receiver of the physical object can view the memory anytime on their own base station and choose to destructively review or overwrite with a new memory. As digital memories are played back, they slowly degrade over time.
Technology
Memories are tied to physical objects using standard, rewriteable RFID tags. These tags communicate with our proprietary base station that uses an RFID reader and Neopixel LEDs to create,read, and overwrite content. Users can craft their memories with a variety of MR headsets including the Meta Quest 3 and Snapdragon supported “ThinkReality” headsets. Content can take the form of any standard multimedia file formats including photos, video, audio, 3d models but it really comes to live when you arrange it in a spatial environment and narrate your story to it.
Challenges:
The idea went back-and-forth for a long time before we could finalize it, which took a large proportion of time on the first day. Several members of the team are having inconveniences in physical conditions, and one of the team was absent for a whole day for emergency care. Thus lacking of time becomes the largest challenges we faced.
What we’re proud of:
We are proud of creating an experience enabling both introspective and shared connections, cherishing both physical and digital worlds and showing significance for physical and mental health and wellbeing creating connections and appreciating life in the moment. We are also proud of fully functional and beautiful prototype, communication between hardware and mixed reality headsets.
Conclusion
We chose this project because we as a team understand what it means to connect with friends, family, and especially after this weekend, strangers. We know these moments are special but fleeting. We wanted to capture the magic of a temporal experience through technology and share that with the world.
Next Steps
General
- We would like to develop an AI model to initiate gradual multimodal dissolving every time a memory recording is revisited.
- We would like to add more variation to recording of stories such as smell and heightened movement.
Technical
- Right now the communication between the ESP and the app is based on WIFI it should be changed to BLE so that there does not need to be a specific setup process on the XR-hardware (connecting to the WIFI)
- All the memories are saved locally on the XR device this should be changed to a cloud-based storage so different headsets can view the same stories.
- For recording XR headset is the best (because of spatial interaction) but viewing on an AR based phone app could be fun.
Built With
- c#
- esp
- openxr
- quest3
- snapdragonspaces
- socialxr
- stereokit
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