Cardiff University – CYB-AR | Solarflare Studio

// services

Experiential Design

Motion Design

Educational Tool

Networked HoloLens 2 mixed-reality teaching tool Solarflare built for Cardiff University's Cyber Security department, letting multiple users share a MR environment for both teaching and partner demonstrations.

A shared mixed-reality environment for cybersecurity

We built this networked HoloLens 2 experience for Cardiff University's Cyber Security department to give them a demonstration asset that could do two things simultaneously: teach, and impress. The department needed something that would show prospective corporate partners and research collaborators what their facilities and thinking were capable of. A PDF or a campus tour was not going to carry that argument with a technical audience.The system allowed multiple HoloLens 2 users to share the same mixed-reality environment, seeing and interacting with the same persistent holographic content anchored in the physical space of the department. Network traffic, threat visualisations, and system architecture diagrams that would normally live on a screen could be walked around, pointed at, and discussed as shared spatial objects.

Networked MR architecture and the technical build

Getting multiple HoloLens 2 devices into a shared spatial anchor frame reliably is a non-trivial problem. World anchors need to be consistent across devices so that holographic content appears in the same physical position for every user. We used Azure Spatial Anchors as the alignment foundation and built a custom state-sync layer to handle multi-user interactions in the shared scene.The content pipeline was built to allow the department's own staff to update and extend the holographic material without requiring ongoing development support. Cardiff's team could add new scenarios, update network diagrams, and reconfigure the spatial layout through an admin interface we built alongside the HoloLens experience.

Why it worked as a capability demonstration

The audience for this kind of demonstration, senior researchers, corporate security teams, potential funding partners, responds to credibility signals. Being handed a HoloLens 2 and placed inside a shared mixed-reality environment built specifically to visualise cybersecurity concepts is a different conversation-opener than a slide deck. The experience communicated that Cardiff's Cyber Security department was operating at the leading edge of both the subject matter and its teaching methods.For us, the project is an example of how MR can serve institutional positioning as much as it serves learning outcomes. The two objectives reinforced each other: an experience rigorous enough to function as a genuine teaching tool was also compelling enough to function as a demonstration of the department's capabilities.

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