Augmented reality

For two years, TELECOM Nancy has set up lessons and projects dedicated to augmented and mixed reality and has acquired Microsoft HoloLens glasses.

Innovation is one of the fundamental values of TELECOM Nancy. The school, in conjunction with its partner companies and research laboratories, constantly develops its teaching in order to train its students in emerging themes and technologies in the field of computing and digital technology.

Developed by Microsoft in partnership with NASA and marketed since the end of 2016, these glasses allow you, independently (no computer or smartphone needed), to simulate holograms that fit into the user’s field of vision while retaining their real environment (unlike virtual reality headsets, for example) and interact with (this is called mixed reality).

The school trains its 2nd year students from the “Embedded Software” advanced course to the development of applications under HoloLens.

For this, it benefits from the support of the company Actimage , sponsor of the 2014 class of TELECOM Nancy and official partner of Microsoft for Augmented and Mixed Reality projects.

The students were able to benefit from a presentation of the applications and an initiation workshop to the 3D Unity development platform by Jérémy Boistière , HoloLens expert from the Parisian Business Unit of Actimage, in charge of the team made up of developers , 3D and UI/UX designers developing HoloLens apps.

Actimage develops many projects using HoloLens technology in the fields of health, industry, commerce, culture or education, such as “Hol’Autisme”, a research and development project on the learning with mixed reality for children with autism spectrum disorders (Winner of the 2017 French IOT competition).

PROJECTS AROUND AUGMENTED AND MIXED REALITY AT TELECOM NANCY

As part of the ” Portable Embedded Systems ” and ” Intelligent Connected Objects ” modules, the students of the LE advanced study at TELECOM Nancy worked on a project combining temperature sensors, a Winphone and HoloLens glasses .
The objective of the project is to be able to display the temperature of a room in the building in augmented reality.
The location of the user is done using the GPS of the smartphone which retrieves the corresponding temperature by interrogating the nearest probe. The information is then communicated to the HoloLens glasses which display it live. Some students went as far as mixed reality by offering “virtual” interaction with the probe (change of color, unit, etc.).
This project is therefore divided into 3 parts; the web service providing the temperature from the sensors, the Winphone application for locating and detecting the nearest probe and the HoloLens application for augmented display and interaction.

The technologies used for the development of UWP (Universal Windows Platform) applications with HoloLens are the Microsoft development environment with Visual studio 2017 (also used for application development under Winphone), the development platform 3D Unity (game engine used in video games) and languages C++ or C# .
Work on this project allows students to acquire skills in the field of embedded systems and smart connected objects.

These projects are innovative becausein direct contact with the world of research (CRAN / LORIA) around theindustry 4.0 (or industry of the future) which aims to organize production processes induced by innovations related to the Internet of Things and digital technologies, such as cobotics, augmented reality, 3D printing, artificial intelligence, in order to exploit data from the Big data and the digital model ” (wikipedia definition).

Contact : Vincent BOMBARDIER , teacher-researcher in charge of the ” Embedded Software ” module