The Spark ARms

An AR representation of a virtual meeting place for the Spark AR community which will be further developed into a fully immersive VR space for the Occulus.

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The Spark Arms is a virtual meeting place for the members of the Spark AR community. Covid 19 has seriously impaired peoples ability to meet in person but for global online communities this was already a big challenge. The Spark Arms Instagram effect will give our community a taster of the space which I am going on to build in full immersive VR for the Oculus.

Virtual meeting places will become increasingly valuable to communities and organisations as the uptake of immersive tech continues to rise but, currently, VR spaces that are available tend to be very generic which is why I foresee a huge rise in demand for branded digital environments. Looking at the success of recent virtual events such as the Travis Scott experience suggests that virtual branded environments within established digital channels such as Fortnite offer brands a huge potential revenue stream.

The Spark ARms may be a digital space, but what if it wasn't? What if half of this space was built in the real world and the other half in AR. I've deliberately designed the space to include the physically possible and the physically impossible as I believe AR can be incredibly powerful when designed in tandem with interior spaces and architecture as opposed to being applied afterwards.

I have a background in retail design and have wanted to create a branded environment in Spark for a while now. My process started by creating mood boards for the space which not only represented Spark as a brand but also the Spark community and it's creators. I then went on to design the space in plan and elevation before modelling and rendering in 3D. Once I was happy with the 3D renders I set about optimising the models and building the space in Spark. Once this was complete I used the patch editor to program the interactions.

Unfortunately I was unable to get three key interactions into the space as I ran out of time. These were a particle based painting/drawing feature allowing users to concept face effects on the 'sketch wall', a working laser darts game and a working ping pong game in the 'instant gaming' zone, although I will be adding these in future.

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