Guest Blogger: Jim Stiefelmaier, creative director, Cubic Innovation
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are promising technologies currently revolutionizing and disrupting various industries including gaming, entertainment, and Cubic’s core business verticals, military training and transportation informatics.
Recently, Cubic was invited to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to participate in the Reality Virtually Hackathon – an AR/VR hackathon where students from MIT and other universities from around the world converged to create, learn and explore the advancements of these two up-and-coming technologies into emerging and lesser-cultivated fields.
Cubic Global Defense (CGD)’s Mike Collier led a group of Cubic engineers and innovators from various backgrounds and regions to propose technological challenges to participating engineering students. The Cubic team also had the opportunity to mentor student hackathon teams and reinforce Cubic’s innovation in augmented and virtual reality.
As part of the hackathon challenge, Cubic brought the latest gear in Microsoft HoloLens, Yost Labs’ inertial measurement units (IMU) and Nerf guns. The Cubic team disassembled several Nerf guns and integrated the IMUs into the toy’s external form-factor, while heroically solving numerous software issues to create a battery-powered, Wi-Fi solution enabling communication between the IMU/gun combination and the Microsoft HoloLens.
The Cubic team, consisting of Craig Smith and Dylan Snow (both from CGD New Zealand) and Brandon Jacoby (CGD San Diego), not only spoke to students about AR and VR capabilities, but also challenged the student hackers to solve an issue related to fusing real-time spatial data from an IMU and visualizing the resulting virtual gunfire in the HoloLens, so that it perfectly coincides with the hand-held toy gun. This difficult problem has many real-world applications in Cubic’s current training programs.
In addition to managing a Cubic information booth and recruiting students for internships and future job opportunities over the three-day event, Tristan Kernagis (CGD Orlando) and Jim Stiefelmaier (Cubic Innovation) mentored student hackathon teams on the Unity software development kits (SDK) and various AR/VR hardware 
solutions. The team also provided feedback on user interface/user experience (UI/UX), narrative design and art pipelines from the presented solutions.
Craig Smith even spoke on the topic of “Augmented Reality in the Real World,” which was live-cast around the world!
As the hackathon neared the end, Craig Smith was selected to be a judge for the event. Besides interacting with the student teams, being a judge provided Craig the opportunity to network with engineering professors and industry professionals, heightening their awareness of Cubic’s capabilities and needs – offering the possibility for future collaboration efforts.
We, as a Cubic team, were honored to support the next generation of high-tech engineers, increasing our ability to recruit the best and brightest in addition to placing Cubic at the forefront of cutting-edge technology.
Let’s just say, we can’t wait to do this again next year!