How many times a day do we snap a photo, or look at videos that other people have shared? We do this so regularly now that I sometimes forget how different this experience was just a few years ago. And I love that while the cameras and sensors we use keep evolving, our intentions (to document and share particular moments in time) have remained mostly constant.
TEACHING NEW CAPTURE BEHAVIORS
Our goal was to make the experience as predictable, forgiving, and enjoyable as possible. Drawing from familiar capture workflows, we tried out several different approaches before settling on our current architecture.
One of our biggest design challenges was how to teach people an entirely new behavior in real-time, given a tracker in development. We needed to provide users with enough guidance to understand what they needed to do to capture successfully, without overwhelming them.
To this end, we focused on timely, visual feedback and building a mental model where the user felt that their actions were driving the capture results, and where their movements mapped 1:1 with what they saw on screen and in the resulting model.
USING VR TO PROTOTYPE AND TEST AR
We created many lo-fi prototypes in order to quickly test out our assumptions and push our technology further, taking the most promising prototypes forward into the product and iterating. We use whatever tools suit the goals and timeline, so prototypes might be sketches, paper prototypes, UI clickthroughs, videos, or full 3D interactive simulations.
To test out real-time interactions that relied heavily on user movement, we used after-market VR headsets (Windows Mixed Reality and Oculus) to prototype our Mixed Reality interactions. This allowed us to rapidly build and test out an ideal experience without needing finished hardware or software and helped us communicate our experience goals. This also enabled us to measure and study the effect of feedback on user motion and its subsequent impact on model quality.
Learnings
The key to working through ambiguity is to have a deep understanding of technology and its boundaries until I can simplify it enough that I can teach my 82 years old grandma.
We can maximize our superpowers by working as a team.
Enhance innovation and collaboration across all disciplines by talking in the engineer and PM’s language.