Vivid AR Portfolio Part II: The Creative and Development Process

Published in

vividcoin

6 min readJan 10, 2019

In our last article, we focused on the technological backdrop that makes up the current Spatial Computing landscape. Today, we are diving into the contextual background of Vivid AR Portfolio, and how Spatial Computing can provide a meaningful application to our target customer.

In November 2017 the cryptocurrency markets were in full swing — the emotions, the pumps and dumps, the power and might of the bull market was in full effect. We notices three emerging trends from this chaos:

The addictive need to have your portfolio’s value and market data accessible anytime anywhere.
The emotional output of images surrounding fancy meals out, new sports cars, watches, and other items gained from the bull market.
The tribal nature people have to specific coins and tokens, regardless of price action, the desire to back up their ‘team.’

With these driving trends in mind, we embarked on exploring these opportunities, analyzing adjacent market trends, and took a hard look at our team’s background and expertise in building Spatial User Experiences.

1. Mobile Portfolios:

The landscape for mobile focused cryptocurrency portfolio apps is much like many other verticals. You have Coke, and you have Pepsi. Burger King or McDonalds.

The two main products in this space are Blockfolio and Delta. There exists a broad array of other applications, but in terms of overall market share it is highly dominated by these two applications.

2. Showing Off:

One of the more fascinating elements of the cryptocurrency enthusiast community, is an emphasis on shiny objects. Let’s break this down further.

With such a rush of new money being generated by traders, the inevitable result is exorbitant purchases. Cars, vacations, watches, you name it. And as we will cover in the next section, an almost religious devotion to the coins and tokens that created that opportunity.

Naturally, people want to share their newfound goods, through posting ‘brag’ photos on various crypto social media and related messageboards.

3. Tribal Nature & Memes:

When looking at the cryptocurrency markets, it is much like many other landscapes where humans congregate. A great comparison is sports teams, or traditional tech companies. Be it two competing football teams, or competing graphics card manufacturers, the space is rife with a tribalistic mentality.

Branding, visual appeal and narrative creation are fundamentally important parts of cutting through the noise in this space. Memes and ideas are drawn by the project and their communities alike, in order to make an impact in other’s mind, drawing them into investing.

We wanted to create an application that innovated on these aspects, bringing them all together to build a novel and impactful experience to those in the cryptocurrency space.

One of the earliest concept pieces for Vivid

Vivid 1.0

We set to work in early 2018 testing various ideas and concepts for what would constitute a successful user experience, and feature set.

We knew that it was vitally important to allow users good portfolio and holding tracking, some of these core features were the following:

Market Data, including prices, specific exchange selection, candlestick charts with different time frames, volume, and other related data.
Portfolio Data, allowing users to enter specific trades and coins that make up their portfolio.

Another aspect was establishing a brand identity, one that was thoughtful, playful, and fun — all aspects that hark back to our original trend identification exercise.

With the advent of Vivi, our mascot and logo, the project’s brand identity began to take shape. Playing with lighter color schemes and gradients initially,

Our focus began to turn to identifying they key areas of opportunity in translating that basis of user data, into the world of Spatial Computing inside the experience.

Initial real world Interaction and ARKit tests

This is where we started to deep dive into the overall hierarchy and user flow of the application:

Additionally, this gave way to a more professional, dark, and serious tone as we expanded the development process. Keeping with the original mission, Vivi was very much retained and improved:

Around this same time, an all new responsive website was implemented, in order to best showcase the upcoming application release and additional details:

We spoke about the importance of Spatial Computing in our last article, so with that and the above context in mind, let’s explore this aspect further.

Our mission was to blend our knowledge and skill set in building Spatial Experiences, and combine it with these identified trends. In order to build an innovating experience that the broad crypto audience could dynamically use and love. These areas included:

An easy to use coin pair and exchange selector for placing individual charts in the real world. We found that due to the tribal aspect, users wanted to display a particular coin chart, alongside the relevant real world material.
Intuitive 3D Spatial placement and selection controls. Since you are dealing with a 3D space, through the interactions of a 2D touchscreen, simplification and ease of use is key, especially as this is the first time most users are touching an AR application.
Capture & Share, being able to quickly take a photo or short video of the space, compositing the digital AR content on top of the real world. Users can quickly export out to their favorite social networks without leaving the app experience.

Vivid’s overall app experience began to take shape

Throughout the next several months, the application was refined, and focused on stability and performance both in traditional 2D and 3D AR modes.

This lead us to where we are today, completing our month long private beta testing period, and ramping up to open the Public Beta to all.

Amplifying the original key trends we identified, we built what is known today as, Vivid AR Portfolio:

1. Mobile Portfolios:

In App screenshot: Portfolio Home Screen

2. Showing Off:

3. Tribal Nature & Memes:

In App screenshot: AR Mode (User Submitted, crypto loves dark humor)

While there is still much more road to travel with Vivid AR Portfolio, our team is very pleased in being able to take the initial abstract concepts, and reign them into a completed Beta Application available for iOS and Android in just under 8 months.