Pitching concepts, workarounds and mentoring | day-to-day in XR design
An interview with a talented designer, who transitioned from studies directly into the world of XR.
Jagoda Wrobel is a creative technologist and speaker, currently working at Blippar. We had a fascinating chat about her experiences studying AR/VR, interfacing with clients on XR projects and the pain points of designing for spatial.
The rest of this article is in Jagoda’s words.
Your journey into XR
I studied Graphic Design at university. In my final year I was drawn to immersive experiences. Think Instagram and Tik Tok AR filters. I actually made an AR filter that lets users customise a bicycle.
After undergraduate, I studied a master’s degree in AR/VR at Goldsmith’s University. It was intense! But very helpful. It had been frustrating to have ideas that were curtailed by a lack of expertise in XR. This exposure to coding, Unity, Maya, Blender and more empowered my creativity.
Working at Blippar
Blippar is an AR content creation platform featuring a design tool and an SDK. They also run an immersive design consultancy. I have worked here since May 2022.
I work on the consultancy side, conceptualising designs for client pitches. It’s especially interesting when you are working with stakeholders who have minimal experience in AR.
The general process is as follows:
- we discuss ideas and requirements with the client
- once they agree to the project, we work on more designs
- I design UI, along with the UX for the whole experience. This includes 3D models. We have a team to add the finishing touches to our 3D models, but I make the early renditions of these models.
Favourite work so far
We worked on a children’s game. Everyone on the project was of course an adult and there was no research into what children actually like! Decisions were all being made off the back of assumptions by adults.
We had the client’s take designs home and test them with their own kids and it helped so much.
Speaking at Conferences
I just spoke at the UX Conference. I really enjoyed it, the organiser Sergey had approached me to bring AR/VR into the running order.
I demoed the Blippar builder, a no-code platform to dapple with AR. Then later on I transitioned into using the SDK. There were a lot of students approaching me afterwards, asking about career paths into AR/VR. I have spoken at a few universities to share career advice.
Pain points in AR/VR
Lack of expertise
I often speak to colleagues and former students who understand this stuff. But lots of clients don’t understand like we do.
This makes selling AR/VR challenging at times. The lack of understanding makes it difficult to bring clients on the journey with you.
Lack of time to prototype AR/VR
In client work, there’s money involved, timelines. This makes it difficult to finalise pixel-perfect prototypes that meet every client requirement and manage expectations perfectly. But it is still important that clients fully understand designs before we sign off and hand-over to the developers.
We do allow for adjustments after we finish designing an experience, but we can’t completely change an idea. So of course the more you show at the beginning, the better. But this is time consuming.
To be more efficient, I sometimes use MidJourney AI for creating rough storyboards.
Lack of prototyping tooling
I wish there was a better way to prototype. There is a way to visualise a design in VR from Figma, but it’s just a plugin. It’s still challenging to incorporate it into a 3D design.
Early pitch process is sometimes unclear
We provide an early pitch in 2D on a Google Slides deck. We try to explain that we are showing them a concept, not a 3D experience, at the early stage. This is to validate our understanding and clarify requirements.
If you design a concept on a fake backdrop in Figma, some stuff is cropped to mimic the field of view in a 360º space. Sometimes clients are asking why it is cropped and we try to explain it’s because we’re showing point of view within a full environment.
Expectations vs build
Sadly, early pitches can be nicer than the eventual build. This is generally due to either cost constraints or because a concept offered something that was not wholly feasible in a real build.
Could do with more AR/VR workshops
We don’t really do co-designs or other workshops at the moment. This would be awesome to do.
Suggestions for the industry
I have a lot, especially in WebAR!
WebXR doesn’t work on every device
With WebXR (browser-based XR), you have to compress everything for performance (3D models, videos, 360º images, etc). So it is challenging to make an experience aesthetically pleasing.
Another performance constraint is innovating. I want WebXR experiences that further interact with the local physical space. This is improving, but it still drains device battery life. And it is difficult to allow things like moving a phone quickly while a 3D object stays anchored to a surface.
As spatial designers, we are forced to find workarounds and compromises to create delightful experiences for web.
Headsets need to be cheaper (this is happening)
I am mostly interested in the mixed reality headsets. These are currently not affordable. Think of education, state schools might want to incorporate good quality XR into their education, but can’t afford sufficient Quest 3’s for a class.
That said, you can use WebXR on some phones and we’re looking to weave WebXR into education at Blippar!
What is matchboxxr?
I hope you found this post valuable. As the founder, I feel I should mention matchboxxr. Matchboxxr is an online tool to create and share simple, interactive XR/VR concepts for workshops or pitches. They can be collaboratively generated in moments and exported to boards or slides.
Turbo charge projects, reduce the risk of mistakes and empower non-developers to articulate ideas.
