Bridging Time & Conversation
Experience to guide future prospective college students
Project foreward
Assignment brief: Using AR glasses ten years in the future as a medium, create a campus tour experience that will tell stories, convey useful information, and delight users.
Over the span of two weeks, my partner and I used a combination of AR prototyping tools of varying fidelity to make a sketch video of this campus tour. Right now, I’m working on improving the affordances and usability of the user interface.
I am personally interested in the Web3 movement, so I envisioned a future where decentralization could enhance our privacy and security.
Tools used: Figma, After Effects, Adobe Aero, Sketchup
Over the span of two weeks, my partner and I used a combination of AR prototyping tools of varying fidelity to make a sketch video of this campus tour. Right now, I’m working on improving the affordances and usability of the user interface.
I am personally interested in the Web3 movement, so I envisioned a future where decentralization could enhance our privacy and security.
Tools used: Figma, After Effects, Adobe Aero, Sketchup
This video uses audio. 🎶️
Our problem space
1. Visitors are separated from critical experiences @ CMU by time.
When people visit campus, they limited by the experiences that they coincided in a time range that’s generally not aligned to the school schedule, such as summer break. Visitors are tired of hearing about the ephemeral and wonderful experiences that happen at CMU but not getting to view them themselves.
2. Conversations are powerful, but are often difficult to initiate.
If you’re talking just to a tour guide, you’re missing out on so much about a campus. Conversations with strangers can be pretty daunting to make. Who do you reach out to? Where do you find them? What do you talk about? Visitors are limited to the amount of connections they can make with current students, faculty, and staff at CMU.
When people visit campus, they limited by the experiences that they coincided in a time range that’s generally not aligned to the school schedule, such as summer break. Visitors are tired of hearing about the ephemeral and wonderful experiences that happen at CMU but not getting to view them themselves.
2. Conversations are powerful, but are often difficult to initiate.
If you’re talking just to a tour guide, you’re missing out on so much about a campus. Conversations with strangers can be pretty daunting to make. Who do you reach out to? Where do you find them? What do you talk about? Visitors are limited to the amount of connections they can make with current students, faculty, and staff at CMU.
Designing for conversation
1. Approach
Volunteer students are marked as “Tartan Ambassadors”. Visitors can filter by interests to search for where they can find Tartan Ambassadors, using a heat map feature that protects privacy.
2. Engage
As they start their conversation, visitors can learn about a student’s interests and activities.
3. Follow up
As they start their conversation, visitors can learn about a student’s interests and activities. Finally, visitors can follow up and reflect on their conversations after the tour is over.
Designing for future security and privacy
Because this tour guide involves personal data such as classroom recordings and student locations/interests, a decentralized backend combined with CMU centralized servers could manage authentication and let users control their own data.
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Creating Effective Interactions in AR
In this project, I explored gestures for interaction. AR experiences are uniquely challenging because they take place in three-dimensional space. For example, when you have a button in AR, where is it anchored? Does it move when you move? How much physical effort does it take to reach a button? I looked towards interfaces like the Hololens to see what worked the best in AR.
Timeline
When users want to access different times, I wanted to create a novel method of creating a timeline that is comfortably oriented to the user. Typically, when you create a dialogue in AR, you might move around and lose track of it. However, this method aims to change this by keeping the dialogue spatially anchored to a finger and at a scale that is comfortable to you.
When users want to access different times, I wanted to create a novel method of creating a timeline that is comfortably oriented to the user. Typically, when you create a dialogue in AR, you might move around and lose track of it. However, this method aims to change this by keeping the dialogue spatially anchored to a finger and at a scale that is comfortable to you.