Four Years Remaining

While writing the previous post I was thinking of coming up with a small fun illustration for Aframe. I first heard about AFrame at the recent European Innovation Academy - a team-project-based entrepreneurship summer school. The team called MemVee was aiming to develop an AFrame-based site which would allow students to design and view interactive "Memory Palaces" - three-dimensional spaces with various objects related to their current study topics, organized in a way that simplifies remembering things for visual learners. Although I have never viewed a "Memory Palace" as something beyond a fantastic concept from a Sherlock Holmes TV episode, I am a visual learner myself and understand the importance of such illustrations. In fact, I try to use and preach graphical references in my teaching practice whenever I find the time and opportunity:

• In this lecture the concept of a desk is used as a visual metaphor of "structuring the information" as well as to provide an outline to the talk.
• Here and here an imaginary geographical map is used in a similar context.
• For the computer graphics course I had to develop some "slides" as small OpenGL apps for visualizing the concepts during the lecture. This has been later taken to extreme heights in the practical materials designed by Raimond-Hendrik, who went on to give this course (alongside with a seminar) in the following years. Unfortunately the materials are closed for non-participants (yet I still hope they will be opened some day, do you read this, Raimond?), but the point is that every single notion has a tiny WebGL applet made to illustrate it interactively.
• Once I tried to make a short talk about computer graphics, where the slides would be positioned on the walls of a 3D maze, so that to show them I'd have to "walk through the maze", like in a tiny first-person shooter game. Although this kind of visualization was not at all useful as a learning aid (as it did not structure anything at all), it none the less looked cool and was very well appreciated by the younger audience of the talk, to whom it was aimed at.

I have lost the sources of that last presentation to a computer error and decided to recreate a similar "maze with slides" with AFrame. The night was long and I got sucked into the process to the point of making an automated tool. You upload your slides, and it generates a random maze with your slides hanging on the walls. It is utterly useless, but the domain name "slideamaze.com" was free and I could not resist the pun. [Update from 2018 - the domain expired and the project migrated to slideamaze.ing.ee.]

Check it out. If you are into programming-related procrastination, try saving the "mazes" generated by the tool on your computer and editing the A-frame code to, say, add monsters or other fun educational tools into the maze.