Co-SpACE# is a project by Jennifer Olearczyk, the subject of her doctoral thesis. She brought me in for the technical implementation. It is a virtual and hybrid classroom in which learners can create arbitrary virtual elements, display them on HoloLens 2 devices and manipulate them.

With my systems-oriented thinking and some experience in virtual 3D space I was able to contribute conceptually as well – but above all I planned the entire system technically, following Jennifer's concept. Early on I proposed a distributed architecture in which data, models and part of the computation move to a local server to take load off the HoloLens 2. To display arbitrary elements we also needed a simple content management system and a procedural 3D interface.

I laid the first foundations as a student assistant together with two colleagues. For my master's thesis the decision was made to rebuild what we had learned in a completely new approach and shed the legacy. The result was a system rewritten from scratch in about three months, which genuinely works the way the closing video shows – except for voice control and video conferencing. Everything else ran as depicted.

Unfortunately the system leaned heavily on the Photon Unity Network and Microsoft Azure Spatial Anchors. The latter were discontinued, which is why it can no longer be used today. For my later work this was a formative influence: since then I build for independence from outside services.