F.D.R: The Curtain Call
It all started this February. Four young people, Vasilis, Danae, Kostas and George fused their unique abilities in order to form Future’s Dreaming Reality (F.D.R), a new foundation with the vision to combine the developing technologies of Virtual Reality (V.R) and Artificial Intelligence (A.I). What they came up with was the idea of an online, multiplayer, real-time media platform in which people could connect via their V.R headsets and get informed about anything that matters to them by a unit of A.I. The name of the project was “V-Room”.
Time went by and the team kept bonding through continuous meetings and a lot of work and discussion. Every week they had to achieve on small goal. And they did. In order for their idea to progress further, they knew they had to empathise with their future clients, so they made their first User Experience Map.
The problems that the current era was facing was the enormous quantity of fake news being produced and the incapability of people to seek the true information, as well as the fact that young people had stopped being interested in current affairs. So F.D.R via V-Room offered an interesting way for people to have quality and authentic information thus solving both of the problems.
From then on, they went on a series of interviews with potential users of their idea and tried to ask their opinion and get quality feedback by showing them their user map. What they discovered was that people didn’t know much about V.R nor A.I so for starters they had to familiarize themselves exceptionally well with these technologies. And they did. They contacted professionals of the field that shared with F.D.R crucial knowledge that helped their project bloom.
During all this time, the team had a lot of feedback sessions in class which allowed them to see their flaws and try to perfect them and solve problems that occurred. One of the most interesting feedback sessions that all the teams enjoyed and progressed through it in class was The Speed Dating/ World Cafe experience. F.D.R interacted with various groups and got the chance to advise and get advised on point.
The four members worked hard as time passed but they were constantly challenged by sudden difficulties and problems that rose. One of the most humongous phase for them was the state of prototyping. There they had to combine all their acquired knowledge in order to finally come as close as possible to their target. The actual embodiment of their project, V-Room.
It was a long journey indeed, but like all journeys, it came to its end.
Konstadinos Kolaitis Giorgos Zervos Danai kiritsi Betty Tsakarestou
