ZeroToOne - XR Circuit Studio

Logo
AR visualsation of a hybrid session
AR circuit analysis
VR representation of the model

Inspiration

We are four 2nd year Electronic and Information Engineering students which spent most of the 1st year completing laboratory exercises for circuit analysis and design. We have thought that we can use our previous experiences to lead us to the idea behind ZeroToOne's XR Circuit Designer.

What it does

The XR Circuit Designer has the aim to help both the students and professors to comperhend laboratory exercises easier and more in depth. With the help of our Android apk/platform, the users can flow step by step instructions to building a physical circuit after an AR model projected by a XR headset. Prototype only achieved AR and VR separatelly as we didnt have access to either Hololens or Cisco's ...

How we built it

The XR Circuit Designer was built using the Unity XR SDK, which allows for seamless integration of XR applications on a multitude of different devices. Because we were using Unity, naturally all of our code was written in C# and heavily utilized the built-in Unity classes, methods etc. For the models of the circuit, we made use of Unity ProBuild to compose resistors, capacitors and more from a series of simple shapes and colours.

Challenges we ran into

Using the Unity XR SDK can be a bit a fiddly and takes a while to set up properly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A few people in the group had tried their hand at XR development before and knew from experience it could take weeks to create a meaningful XR application. As such, we are very proud we managed to put together an XR project in less than 24 hours.

While not utilized in the final project, we managed to create a fast and dynamic line renderer in Unity that directly interacted with the rendering buffers. The process to create this included calculating our own normals, UVs and vertices.

What we learned

We learnt a lot about developing XR applications and the difficulty and challenges that comes with it. The project also proved to be a good brush up on our C# skills as well as challenging our CAD modelling abilities.

What's next for ZeroToOne - XR Circuit Studio

We would like to make the application have a seamless integration with Ciscos Webex, such that a TA/instructor would be able to guide a student while using the device to debug and/or construct their circuit.

Additionally, one could consider in some way integrating a circuit simulator into the application e.g. to show the expected signals at different points in the circuit.