UX PoC in Spatial Computing #6: Bring to me
The 6th episode of a series to share Opuscope’s work focusing on building the best possible User eXperience (UX) in Spatial Computing, thanks to Proof of Concepts (PoC). Maybe they will help other professionals through their Spatial Computing journey.
A precise spatial computing need
When you’re immersed in an experience, things can be anywhere around you. Most of the time, it’s properly designed for you to have access to what you need, and see things you don’t need to interact with from a distance.
Things get more complicated when you are immersed in the experience you are creating for an audience. With Minsar, the user was able to create any type of immersive experience in WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), meaning they were using the visualization device to create their immersive experience.
To make sure they could reach anything in the scene, we offered a teleport feature. They could teleport on the ground but also in the air, zoom out/in the scene, etc. Discover more details in the related article, plus you’ll get some context about how we made PoCs:
However, we thought it wasn’t enough and wanted to investigate a complementary idea: what we call the “Bring to me”.
The idea
Magical interactions are possible in Spatial Computing, like teleporting and moving objects without touching them. This was possible in Minsar but we thought that sometimes you don’t want to move from your current position in the scene, and editing an object from far isn’t really convenient.
To solve that, we wanted to provide the user with a feature to temporarily make the object spawn in front of them to see it closely and edit it as they want, before releasing it to its original position.
We worked both on mobile devices and immersive headsets at the time, and we thought it would also be helpful in mobile AR not to move too much while creating.
What we did
This is quite a small PoC and we weren’t able to implement it as we had more important features to develop, and then we dropped Minsar. Still, I think it’s pretty interesting.
To bring an element, the user had to select it, then hit the “Bring to me” button. To release it, there was also a dedicated button. It was huge in the PoC as it was its only purpose, but it would have been well integrated into Minsar menu among other editing buttons.
We iterated on where to bring the element in front of the user:
- We chose a minimum comfortable distance, especially for small objects.
- Then defined a rule for the distance based on the element’s biggest edge to make sure it was fully visible in the FoV.
Once the position was set, we fine-tuned the travel speed and animation from the element’s original position to the user.
Finally, to make the user able to fully focus on the being edited element, we decided to hide everything else in the scene and show it again when the element was released to its spot.
As I said, this PoC was available on headsets and mobile. The only difference between both was that on mobile the element was parented to the camera to follow it during the editing. This way the user could work comfortably, without holding the phone in the same direction; on headsets, the user could keep their sense of the space.
Note that the scale and rotation set in “Bring to me” wasn’t saved, not to mix up the scene since we can’t properly orient something when we don’t see its environment.
This was a quick PoC but it was very interesting to work on it. I think this feature could be very useful for Minsar-like apps. To me, it’s worth sharing!
You can check out more complex PoCs we made for Minsar:
And many more in my stories to give general information about UX in Emerging Technologies…
