It’s 2030, and October is just getting underway. Growing up, Halloween was always one of your favorite holidays. You loved the costumes, the candy, and the imaginatively decked out houses that would pass by out the car window. Now, as a first time homeowner, you’ve got a lifetime of magical ideas you want to bring to life.
You toss on your lightweight AR glasses. You ask your virtual assistant to find wood-based Halloween DIY decorations that would be a good fit for a back deck. Cycling through options, you stop at one that catches your eye – a Martha Steward design of a witch and a few black cats. It’s as cliche as you can get, but it fits your vision. Now it’s time to bring that vision to life.
You clamp your wood sheet in place and don your AR glasses. You see the template of the first cat perfectly overlaid onto the wood. You guide your jigsaw along the digitally superimposed line and before long, out pops a perfectly shaped scaredy cat ready to be painted.
Welcome back to 2021 – Actually, the latter part of this scenario is not too far removed from what we’ll get done today. I will be DIY’ing Martha Stewart witch and cat decorations…using AR glasses.
You can make these decorations in traditional ways – either eyeball and freehand sketch onto the wood directly, which requires drawing chops to get good results. Or, you can print out paper templates, then painstakingly align and tape/glue them one by one onto the wood until you have the pattern laid out. In this case, the witch required 42 sheets and the cats 36 in total. I wanted to try a non-traditional method.
I have used and built software for hands-free AR for about six years. Through the amazing work of others and my own work, I have a good sense where and how current AR can excel. One of those ways is using AR to overlay a digital template onto objects, for example, when creating a garden.
Personally, I also want an excuse to combine power tools with AR. This shows off the benefits of AR glasses when you need your hands free to do real work. What better way to create excitement than adding a flesh ripping machine to the mix 😁.
For this project, I am using Microsoft HoloLens 2 AR glasses. The software I created myself for these types of uses.
To get the template into usable form, I pull the Martha Stewart design into Photoshop and tweak the outline color. I make the rest transparent. From experience, thin red lines work well as they are highly visible against a real-world backdrop and are sharply reproduced in HoloLens. I also add purple plus signs to use as a reference when aligning the digital template over the wood.
For the AR app, I build something simple with a few key features. I add functionality to move the templates as needed. However, knowing I will be laying them flat on plywood, I lock them to a specific axis to make alignment easier. I also include an ability to pin the holograms in place. This will prevent me from accidentally moving the template when the work begins. This is an essential feature whenever using holograms as a guide. It is easy for today’s AR headsets to get confused on your intent when you are moving your hands all over the place.
With the digital stuff squared away, I move on to the construction phase. I clamp the first plywood sheet in place, grab the needed tools, and don the AR glasses. It is worth noting, HoloLenses (both first and second generations) have been tested and conform to basic impact protection requirements. Thus, they also serve as my safety glasses.
With the template aligned, and without fanfare, I take the jigsaw and go. Following along the line visually provides no chore at all. Guiding my saw along that line is a bit more difficult, but this is a result of being rusty with a jigsaw.
A nice feature of superimposing a digital template is they are free from obstructions. At no point is the red line blocked by my hands, accumulating sawdust, or the saw itself. This is sometimes referred to as the X-ray feature of AR.
By the time the first cat is ousted, I am hitting my groove with the jigsaw. My cuts are cleaner and I’m more effectively angling into sharper curves. The results are promising.
One slight challenge I’m facing is a blurring of the line when my eyes get too close to it. There are a few factors at play here, but we’ll boil it down to the way HoloLens produces visuals for each eye and the proximity I am to the overlay. This effect can be reduced by looking with just one eye, similar to if you were aiming a bow. However, it turns out I am one of the few with the inability to wink or close one eye at a time 🤷🏽♀️.
This small issue has little effect on the outcome. The cats come out looking damn near purrfect.
The witch will pose a slightly different obstacle. The size of the piece requires me to move the sheet of plywood several times to be able to safely make the cuts. Moving the plywood will result in the digital overlay no longer being aligned. I could realign the template each time, but the time and effort seemed like pyrrhic victory. I could also have added a feature to auto-align the template based on a strategically placed QR code, but that would have added more complexity to development; and I am a premium subscriber to Keeping it Simple, Stupid.
The solution I’m going with is decidedly low tech. I’m tracing the digital overlay directly onto the wood. This step proves to be a breeze and the accuracy is spot on. I could have done this with the cats, too, but that would have been an unnecessary extra step.
With the template transferred from the digital to the analog world, I pull a Michelangelo and cut away everything that is not the witch.
Now, all my wooden minions are free from their rectangular constraints and ready to frighten the living. I paint them black and rig up stands, completing the project.
The outcome is as good as I could have hoped. The overlay was easy to see and follow and the resulting decorations look great. Frankly, having done it this way, I don’t want to go back to the old way.
I have a penchant for theatrics, so in staging the decorations I add dramatic lighting and smoke from a clearance rack fog machine. The result is scary good.
The benefits of hands-free AR can be broken down into two buckets: Being able to do things we could never do without it and being able to do things better than we could without it. This project fell into the latter bucket.
To be clear, the overhead to actually do this project today (Photoshopping, building an AR app, owning an AR headset, etc) was greater than the time and effort savings. I don’t expect people to follow this as a tutorial to create economical Halloween decorations. This was to prove a future concept.
However, this same technique of using a digital template does have current use cases that provide economical benefits. Examples – large mural paintings and art installations see a significant reduction in labor and mistakes by eliminating obsolete grid work steps. This also applies to applications in construction, such as installing hangers that support pipes and racks directly from the 3D plans.
As the tech gets significantly cheaper, smaller, and more accessible, the overhead for more broad uses of AR shrinks significantly. This will be a golden era where an unimaginable amount of uses and ideas crossover into the affordable realm of “yeah, this a way better freakin’ way of doing this!”
This project was a visit to that future. I hope you enjoyed your trip.
If anything about this project piqued your interest, reach out. I know you have ideas and thoughts and I’d love to hear them!
Cheers,
Anthony
In the years to come, AR glasses will have a profound effect on how we work, play, and get things done. Let’s not talk hypotheticals. Let’s craft the vision, roll up our sleeves, and build that reality!