Hillier Design Professor Wins Awards for Augmented Reality Prototype

Hannah Kum-Biocca, an assistant professor at NJIT’s Hillier College of Architecture and Design, won two awards for an augmented reality project that she submitted to the EuroXR 2020 conference in Valencia, Spain.

In her project, visitors to physical museums can wear a Microsoft Hololens headset to gain additional information about artifacts, such as looking at a real painting by Vincent van Gogh and seeing a virtual 3-D image of the painter himself standing in his bedroom and art studio, while talking about it in his own words. 

Kum-Biocca calls the project "Artists Emerge from their Paintings". She started in 2015 with straightforward virtual reality software and then realized that augmented reality, which combines physical and virtual worlds, was more compelling.

"VR doesn't care about the real world. In AR the real world is very important to understanding the information," she observed. "Since 2015, every year I made a new version of the prototype of the same concept, slowly changing, and then eventually I felt it was right this year."

VR doesn't care about the real world. In AR the real world is very important to understanding the information

Kum-Biocca's work is part of the Media Interface and Network Design (MIND) laboratory in conjunction with other NJIT departments and researchers at other universities. She said the lab has sent students to prestigious graduate schools such as Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, along with prominent software companies such as Electronic Arts, Google, Microsoft and Samsung.

The dual awards for top demonstration and best application came with a modest cash prize which Kum-Biocca plans to give to her NJIT student assistants June Enriquez and Brandon Kong, along with Abhijit Sprijanth who was a student of Kum-Biocca when both were part of an earlier version of the MIND lab at Syracuse University.

Kong, a fourth-year digital design major from Bridgewater, said his role was to develop the virtual van Gogh character, animate it and edit together the video. He knew the basics, but had to learn about developing anatomically correct movements using a popular software package called Autodesk Maya.

Kong added that he became interested in character design as a child when he found it more entertaining to customize video games than to play them. Now he's able to put professional-grade experience on his resume.

Kum-Biocca said that although the demonstration focused on paintings, the application itself could be used for almost any kind of museum artifacts such as sculpture, physical artifacts, and so on. Her next step is to seek further collaboration at European universities such as MIND lab partner Technological University of Valencia as a gateway to getting the technology into major museums.

Hillier has offered digital design classes for several years. In addition to learning about character design and mixed realities, students can also study game design and user interfaces / user experiences. It is a highly-rated program in New Jersey and soon will offer new options for certificates and master's degrees. Students can learn entirely through Hillier or in conjunction with NJIT's Ying Wu College of Computing.