A downtown Denver computer company has boxed up a bit of spring’s rainy weather. Not a virtual box. It’s a real one. And it’s filled with 200 pounds of white sand — and virtual rain.
System 76 CEO Carl Richell played with the sandbox at the company’s office Tuesday. He built a mound and, using augmented reality, turned it into an island with a mountain range. When he hovered his hands above the sand, the virtual rain poured down, streaming off the mountain peaks to the lowest point.
He mixed and mashed the sand again. The scene changed instantly, thanks to an overhead projector, a motion sensor and a Linux laptop that overlaid the image on the sand.
“It’s measuring what the fluid is doing at all times. And if you have lots and lots of fluid inside the box, you have a lot of calculations going on,” Richell said. ” … The idea is to inspire, to get people to think about what you can do with a computer.”
The company built its own Augmented Reality Sandbox based on software developed a few years ago by researchers at University of California-Davis. To create the live topography map, System 76’s Captain of Engineering Jason DeRose used off-the-shelf gadgets such as the Microsoft motion-sensing Kinect camera, a projector and one of the company’s Ubuntu Linux laptops.
After demonstrating the sandbox at a STEM event for teachers and students in April, the company promised to make it easier for anyone to create their own sandbox.
DeRose spent three days packaging the software for Linux Ubuntu computers. He shared it online last week with a tutorial and a video that has been viewed more than 16,400 times (see it at system76.com/weekend-project/arsandbox).
“The kids were really excited” and kept returning with friends to play with the sand, DeRose said. “We’re just making it easier for users to install it so people don’t have to compile it themselves.”
Augmented reality adds a computer-generated overlay on top of a real scene. In this case, the reality is white sand. Kids who played with the project were dumbfounded, and when they picked up the sand, they’d say, “It’s white,” Richell said, “because it’s so convincing.”
One of the early locations for the AR Sandbox was the UC-Davis Tahoe Science Center at Lake Tahoe. It’s been a successful educational tool to teach kids about geographic, geologic and hydrologic concepts — like how to interpret topographic maps, the concept of a watershed, levies and more, said Heather Segale, the center’s education and outreach director.
“It gets a ton of, excuse the museum speak, dwell time, meaning that people sit there for a long time and play. It’s learning without having to feel like it’s a class,” Segale said. “The land is connected by the water that flows over it. You can build a dam, remove a dam. You can show a landslide. You can see what would happen in a tsunami. … You can make changes in the watershed that affect where water is able to go.”
UC-Davis researchers are working on AR Sandbox Version 2 with lava (“It changes the viscosity so the flow is much slower,” Segale said). And they’re building a game-like version based on a specific geography with the ability to import a land mass from Google Earth. That will help users understand, for example, Lake Tahoe’s water levels in relation to nearby land and mountains.
System 76 will bring its AR Sandbox to the Denver Mini-Maker Faire set for June 11-12 at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
But why would a PC maker that builds Ubuntu Linux machines jump into the AR Sandbox? It’s open-source, Richell said.
“In our vision, computers democratize,” he said. “Power is spread out to many people. Creation happens in lots of different places, and decision-making isn’t centralized. We build powerful computers for people who make things.”