Prototyping Interactions

Week Twelve: 4/3–4/12

Exploring Virtual Care Package with Rapid Prototypes

Following our speed dating exercises with our four concepts and their variations, our team settled on exploring the virtual care package idea in greater detail.

Recap: Virtual Care Package Concept

Our main questions of exploration were:

• How are they capturing?
• How do they capture?
• What is the form of the box?
• What is the product ecosystem?
• What can you do with the things delivered?

To explore these questions in detail, we prototyped the Virtual Care Package concept with bodystorming & paper prototyping, and experience prototyping techniques.

Bodystorming the End-to-End Interactions

In order to understand how our users may go about the capturing, storing, curating, and sending journey, we bodystormed the experience with paper and roleplayed the interactions as a team.

During these explorations, we found that the process of curation and capturing greatly impacted the overall experience of the concept system. We realized that in order for this system to be viable, the process of capturing and sharing has to be as simple as possible, since complicated tasks made the experience feel like a chore.

Our prototyping also revealed to us the technological limitations we needed to consider within the concept. How can we include the user in the captured experiences, even though the user is the person who is capturing? To enable for that, there must be some sort of external device to enable the recording of the user. This led to all sorts of issues, like camera placement, ease of use, etc.

Prototyping the Receiving Experience

Sample experience prototype box

In addition to bodystorming the end-to-end interactions, we also sent two experience prototypes out to the real world to test the reactions of the recipients. One was sent to Monique’s mother, who is not familiar with AR/VR, and one was sent to Nehal’s husband. Included within the experience prototypes were a box with a target (activated with BlippAR), an instructional note, and an image of how the experience prototype would look like once constructed.

Nehal’s husband had generally positive feedback for the experience prototype. He wondered if the prototype could be a more permanent fixture within the home, with the possibility of Nehal changing the tagged content remotely. Both Nehal’s husband and Monique’s parents had difficulty assembling the box, however.

Concept Storyboard for Microsoft Presentation

After our prototyping exercises, we created a concept storyboard to illustrate to our Microsoft Liaisons the concept we will proceed with. The concept we presented to Microsoft is a tagging system whereby users can augment their belongings and messages with media (360 video, photos, immersive models, audio, etc.) with an intuitive MR toolbox. Users can attach these tags (in the form of stickers) to letters, packages, or anything they choose to give to others. The purpose of these tags is to enable richer storytelling between the sender and the receiver of these tagged objects, with the hope that the content can serve as a bridge for further interactions.

An example is below:

This is Monique. Monique just moved to Pittsburgh from California to start grad school at Carnegie Mellon.

As she is settling in, she sees things she thinks her mom may like and decides to capture them with the help of the MR Toolkit.

Monique’s mom likes postcards, so Monique decides to write her mom a postcard from Pittsburgh.

She decides to tag MR content to her postcard with the help of the MR Toolkit Stickers. She attaches on to her postcard.

Using the Toolkit, Monique tags MR content to the sticker on her postcard.

She decides to tag a 3D model of the Cathedral of Learning for her mom. The 3D model allows her mom to expand and contract the model for an immersive experience.

She sends the postcard along…

And a few days later, her mom receives it in the mail. Viewing the MR Toolkit Sticker with her headset, Monique’s mom is able to experience the Cathedral of Learning at home.

Monique’s mom decides to give Monique a call, telling her she’s received the card. They proceed to talk about Monique’s settling in to Pittsburgh, as well as how her mom is doing back in California.

Next Steps

After we gave our presentation to Microsoft, we received feedback that tells us to leverage more of MR’s capabilities. We have thus begun working on refining our concept based on the feedback received, and will be updating our process in following posts.