AR @ CMU

Clients' Request:
a right thing to do

With faith in ubiquitous usage of Head-mounted Augmented-Reality Technology (HMD-AR) in the future, my clients want to innovate solutions that help students reach out to friendswith HoloLens.

Project scope & focus

my Task: do it right

I was challenged to rapidly prototype experiences to explore opportunities and elicit implications for future products through user studies using HoloLens.

goal: Define the Role

As we studied Hololen's functionality, we noticed various opportunities but few metrics to evaluate ideas internally. Hence, I convinced the team to get our users involved and determined the technology's role in a bottom-up fashion.

my storyboards

Strategy: Storyboarding

Considering my immature technical skill and our urgent need to collect feedback, I found storyboards to be the ideal prototype format. The storyboards let me efficiently create boundary objects and effectively convey imaginary design ideas to participants.

User Study: Speed-dating

I presented 9 different storyboards to 6 participants in quick succession during "speed-dating" interviews. I asked my participants to articulate how much they could relate to the character in these scenarios, and learned how they evaluate the effectiveness of proposed technologies.

Goal: Define Look & Feel

Now that we agreed on the technology's role, our next step is to determine how to display the augmented information. To explore different looks & feels while ensuring the quality of each prototype, we decided to conduct parallel prototyping.

Our goal: Define the technology's look & feel

Scenario 1

Scenario 2

Scenario 3

My embodied experiences

Strategy: prototyping embodied experiences

For my prototype, I explored indicating status with AR emojis based on my hypothesis that the emojis would leave clues on its owner's availability and mood.

User Study: Wizard-of-oz

Instead of developing high-fi mock-ups, I used the wizard-of-oz technique to create illusional embodied experiences. I set up the space by placing emojis in advance and having the assistants sit in designated seats. Then, I introduced the testers to the environment as if others picked and placed the emojis.

Goal: Validate feasibility for implementation

The design implications and parallel prototyping practices led us to a final idea: placing text-based augmented information around interior doors to indicate the status of office room owners. As a final step, I aimed to integrate the implementation aspect to validate the technical feasibility of our idea with a desirable role, look, and feel.

Our goal: Validate feasibility for implementation

Stage #1: 
Wireframing

Stage #2:
Prototyping

Stage #3:
Deploying

My mixed-reality prototype Development process

Strategy: Developing Mixed-reality prototypes

I studied the Hololens Application development process, and rapidly prototyped a functional application using Unity and Mixed-Reality Toolkits.

User Study: multivariate Prototype Testing

Due to changes in the course schedule, my project length shrinks from 5 weeks to 3 weeks. Though I didn’t get to develop/test my new prototypes, I drafted a plan for multivariate testing with a set of eight prototypes to reach the best-integrated design.

Switching between diverging and converging thinking, I encountered a lot of perceived moments of success as we came up with funny ideas, pivotal insights, and functional prototypes. I found the key to driving design progress with the double-diamond is to defer judgment of ideas and focus on executions strategically.

When it's time for judgments, I learned to calmly review my past design decisions based on users' and teammates' critical feedbacks. As I embraced the iterative aspect of the double-diamond framework, I started to treat my designs/prototypes as seeds. Then, I naturally began to view the critiques as fruits I harvest. This reframed point of view helps me refuel myself with critiques and challenges.