IMD Final Project: Week 1

Testing the first concept

The first step in creating physical context for AR is a design system that’s intuitive. I came up with 3 possible designs that are supposed to communicate to a user (stand here and face this direction). An AR app will direct users to find this design in a location, face the requested direction, and then hold the phone up to their face.

They move from simple to busy (complex).

Simple

Sort of a Face (medium)

And then the triangle-arrow design

I then sat on my lawn at around 5:30, when most of the people in my neighborhood are walking their dogs, and asked people to try them out and tell me what they thought.

Opinion was split between the simplest option and the triangle, 70–30. Well, 7–3, I stopped at 10 people. The older someone looked, the more they liked the triangle design, so I might get different answers with a different demographic.

I then took pictures of the view from those circles at different heights to see how much a unity canvas would have to change for taller or shorter people looking at an AR overlay. I found that Shaq will have problems with this app if I don’t make a canvas scalable by someone’s height. A 1 foot difference isn’t horrible, any more than that is an issue.

5 Feet

7ish feet

I’m also slowly trudging through fixing assets at prescribed distances and then activating them by Raycast.

I need some better tutorials for this, but Xcode is working, so that’s nice.

On to week 2!