HoloBits: Creativity and Fun in Mixed Reality

The onset of Mixed Reality as a platform offers the opportunity to create new playful paradigms for building and fostering creativity. The Holobits application leverages the tried and tested features of physical block building platforms like LEGO and introduces the benefits of building in mixed environments to support making and storytelling. The proposed system combines the hand tracking capabilities of the Leap Motion with the spatial mapping of Hololens to enable hands-on building experiences with virtual blocks, denoted as “bits.” These blocks have different attributes and characteristics that determine how they look and behave within the mixed reality building space. The platform also allows users to share their creative building process in a frame-by-frame fashion that enables remixing and reflection on every play session. Holobits allows users to record their interactions with their creations to create animated environments with ease and support storytelling. Another way to enable collaboration is to let kids share models (or download someone else's creation in your space), allowing multiple users to build in a shared physical space or over distances, where a player can “hop” into the physical space of the Hololens user using virtual reality. Last but not least, we intend to integrate the Scratch visual programming toolkit into the Holobits platform to allow users to orchestrate their virtual creations and create the ultimate interactive stories.