Bio

Zach Philips is a finance major by schooling, but his interests lie in chemical engineering and materials science. He has built several interesting applications at various hackathons around the country. His main projects at the moment are focused on the translation and explanation of the world’s knowledge into condensed consumable formats within games.

Computational Essay

Organic Polymer-Based Solar Cells »

Project: Molecular Mash AR

Goal

Attempt to make an intuitive learning and simulation environment that uses the massive data repositories of Wolfram to augment the classroom with lightweight AR-based experiences.

Main Results in Detail

Most of my time was spent attempting to manipulate the unity environment with the UnityLink beta. I was partially successful and was able to spawn the entire periodic table of elements as sphere game objects and materials to color each sphere from the Wolfram ChemicalData function. The UnityLink paclet was then corrupted in some form and unable to run. The environment that I’ve created is voice activated and able to spawn any element on the periodic table and a few other molecules by saying “create,” “make,” and “spawn” followed by the element name. It utilizes the IBM Watson Text-To-Speech and Speech-To-Text APIs to process speech input into game action.

Future Work

What’s next for this application is to

• 1. Add in #/& ChemicalData[“”, “ElectronConfiguration”] information and electronegativity to each element in attempt to simulate particle interactions.
• 2. Hook up the assistant to query Wolfram|Alpha for information on request by “ask Wolfram.”
• 3. Add a lessonBuilder component to allow users to build their own lessons with narration, 3D models, images and videos.