Locatrix is a provider of indoor mapping, safety training, and floorplan editing & displaying tools. They cater mostly to First Responders in the event of an emergency, as well as business owners wanting to ensure that their buildings and sites are compliant.
I joined Locatrix in the second half of 2017 as part of a Research & Development endeavour, with a three-month goal of developing a Mixed Reality application using Unity that could make use of all the spatial data the company had access to, as the chief service that CSS provides is drafting Evacuation Signs for businesses. In these three months, I developed a system that consumed the drafted 2D Evacuation Signs, and used them to create a 3D to-scale space, explorable in VR. Below is an example of an Evac Sign, and a demonstration of 3D floorplans automatically (without human guidance) generated in this way.
At the end of these three months, it seemed clear this endeavour showed promise. While we were still a ways away from a practical use-case, the theoretical applications were limitless – giving First Responders a to-scale & explorable 3D environment, allowing clients to complete Emergency and Evacuation training within their own offices, giving Emergency services access to training scenarios in a limitless number of buildings – the ability to place a user within a spatially-accurate 3D floorplan was an incredibly powerful tool for training and simulation.
From this initial period onwards, I was the sole developer of this Mixed Reality application. We developed for Oculus Rift, HMD Odyssey, WebGL and PC Standalone – with practical applications including employee training, site induction, guided and automated training scenarios and data visualization. While I was the only Unity developer on this team, I had been working and collaborating with others near constantly to connect systems, improve the data that we collected and develop new ways to utilize the wealth of spatial data that we already had.
I could go on about discrete markup languages, Mixed Reality technologies, VR design pitfalls, data visualization and designing automated systems all day long, but (for both our sakes) I’ll leave you with a few videos that might be more succinct. That said, please feel free to get in touch if you’d like to give me an ear to talk off – it’s what I do best.
| @callanstein | callanstein@gmail.com |
My contributions made from September 2017 – December 2019