How We Prototyped Our First AR App In 5 Days (Part 2/3)
This post is the second of three posts in which I’ll explain how we created our first AR prototype.
Here is the first post of this mini-series (and here you can read the final post with the app included). Our goal was to learn more about the technologies behind ARKit and ARCore, understand potential use cases and to build an app that users are interested in and willing to test. The whole team was present and we decided to go for Google’s UX design process methodology, which is based on five phases to build a prototype: Unpack, Sketch, Decide, Prototype, Test.
Once we had established our user scenario, we went on to the next part.
2. SKETCH & DECIDE
On the second day, we were going into more details of potential user scenarios.
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Two things we focused on and that would turn into many fruitful discussions:
- what are potential modes to display information. The options included audio, video, textual information, data points, icons, colors and 3D Animation of objects. We also looked at Leap Motion’s design sprints and how they approach user interfaces.
- What are users’ intentions to use the app. Is it more of an entertaining motivation? Do they want to get informed?
While we were discussing these options, the developers would look into the availability of data sources and what frameworks could be used. One decision we made quite early was that we would use ARKit instead of ARCore for now.
We had many ideas and alway checked whether there were better solutions out there already.
At the end of the day and after many discussions, we had a rough understanding of how we wanted to go about all these issues by narrowing down possibilities.
4. PROTOTYPE
Once we roughly understood what options were on the table, we basically found common ground on some issues: What to do, who we do it for, how to do it and what will be the result by the end of the week.
We started prototyping — first on white boards and later on the developers Stephan, Tino and Ronny started playing around with ARKit.
In a few days, I’ll show you what it turned into and if you want, you can also try it out!
About the author: Linda Rath-Wiggins, PhD, is the co-founder and CEO of Vragments, a Berlin-based VR startup that creates VR experiences in collaboration with newsrooms (e.g., this German VR example with Deutschlandradio Kultur). Vragments is developing a VR product called Fader that allows users to create and publish VR stories easily and fast. Vragments produced a Fader use case in cooperation with the Center for Investigative Reporting.
