Greg Kumparak has made a model TARDIS with an AR-augmented interior — and just like on Doctor Who, that interior has a deceiving physical feature.
About six months ago, Kumparak decided to make a change. He left his job running TechCrunch's mobile coverage so he could start learning to make things.
"I’ve always kind of known how to build things," he writes, "I never felt, however, that I could just could just sit down and conjure up something out of nothing. That bothered me."
Kumparak started documenting his first project last week, and it is a doozy. It's a model of the TARDIS from Doctor Who, along with a companion augmented-reality viewer that reproduces one of the time machine's strangest features: It's bigger on the inside.
Kumparak says the project came together in layers. First he wanted to make a TARDIS model, simply because he'd watched a lot of Doctor Who and thought it would be fun. Once that was completed, he set it aside for a while before deciding to enhance the iconic police box with a working light. After that, he set it aside again, before returning to it with the idea that he could use AR to depict the impossible interior.
All told, the project took about five days spread over a month or so, he says. The skills involved ranged from light woodworking and simple circuitry to teaching himself to use 3-D modeling powerhouse Blender alongside the Unity game engine and the Vuforia SDK.
"I've been studying a pretty wide variety of things in the past few months, which has led to an equally wide variety of side projects being taken on," says Kumparak,"You gotta build to learn to build, you know?"
He says that some projects are prototypes for things he might want to come back to, while others are throwaways to test out a new skill. "The TARDIS," he says, "was just built because I thought it'd be cool and wanted it to exist."
