Champion City Part 15: From the Desk of Our Developer! Meet Nitzan Bartov.
Nitzan Bartov is a game developer and architect specializing in interaction and experience design in VR and AR. Her work has been featured at Sundance, SXSW, and Tribeca Film Festival, as well as in publications like The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vice Media and the BBC.
She is also our lead designer and developer working on our Bloomberg Philanthropies’-funded Augmented Reality product at IDEA New Rochelle. I recently sat down with her to learn more about the her process and the values that guided the team’s efforts in developing the AR app, and what she learned along the way.
When developing our AR planning app, our goal was to make a tool to help us gather more feedback from the citizens of New Rochelle (and eventually other communities) about planning proposals that will affect their lives, Nitzan explained. The design process was to gather as much information about the problem as we could, design a prototype to address the problem, then test it and use the findings to inform the next iteration.
IDEA’s research and iteration process was divided into three “sprints.” For the first sprint the team asked community members to fill out a survey; for the second and third New Rochelle’s team tested of a prototype using VR headsets and AR tools, respectively.
“During our second sprint we were creating a prototypes that try to walk the user through a VR experience where people could engage with a physical space in a meaningful way,” says Nitzan.
After visiting the Ruby Dee Park at Library Green and collecting drawings, photos, plans, and detailed information from the city, Nitzan made a 3D model of the site. Nitzan used Iris Virtual Reality (VR) software to display the model in Oculus headsets.
The experience prompted users to respond to basic questions about the way they use the park (“How often do you go to the park?” “Who goes with you?”) Users could view Nitzan’s models from three distinct angles, and the experience included a drawing tool that allowed people to highlight certain areas of the map, by drawing a heart shape next to their favorite spot in the park, for instance.
Nitzan designed these interactions to serve two purposes. On the one hand, the hearts that the users drew provided us with hard data on how people interact with the New Rochelle’s Library Green. Knowing what citizens already value in a space can eliminate some of the guesswork for planners.
But that’s not the only kind of information Nitzan and the team needed to gather from this prototype. “In addition to the data,” Nitzan said. “We were hoping to create a possible experience of how people might use this technology to engage with the space.”
In other words, Nitzan and the team designed an experience not only to give us insight into the Library Green, but also to provide data-driven feedback on the design of the tool itself. Ultimately, the New Rochelle team wanted to study how applicable this kind of technology is for improving civic engagement.
“We learned a lot from these initial tests, but ultimately we concluded that VR might not be the most optimal medium to use to engage large numbers of citizens and gather public opinion,” Nitzan told me. “VR headsets can be expensive, and they are not the easiest technology to use, and most people require some degree of training with the hardware.”
One of our key findings from the second sprint was the hypothesis that less cumbersome hardware could produce better feedback and more public engagement. Using the same 3D model she had designed for the VR app, Nitzan produced an experience that people could access from an app on their phones.
This iteration required much less overhead in terms of equipment, and a less steep learning curve. The user interface for the AR experience was relatively simple; it let users drop a park-related element — such as a tree, a bench, or a swing set — on the ground in front of them, and encouraged users to walk around it.
“This is where the magic happened,” Nitzan says. “People are used to basic touch-screen interactions, but when an object as a physical presence in space, when they can explore it with their body, that is very exciting to people.”
The reaction from the community was positive and enthusiastic. People of all ages were impressed by how simple the on boarding process was, and wanted to know if they could download the app.
This experience confirmed our decision to pivot away from only VR and instead broaden the toolkit to also include AR; AR is easier, more accessible, and more inclusive, values any civic engagement initiative should espouse. By the third sprint, Nitzan had a new prototype of an AR experience for the team to test.
Nicholas Tantillo described the third sprint in an article for Lohud:
“[IDEA New Rochelle Executive Director Amelia] Winger-Bearskin waved the phone’s camera lens over the shop’s floor, and after a few passes a digital model of the of Ruby Dee Park at Library Green appeared on the screen. The app then placed a digital model on the image, creating a hybrid that allows user to “walk around” the image or lean in for a closer look.
New Rochelle’s augmented reality app shows a pastel-colored image of the park during the Grand Market, one of two major farmer’s markets in the city. Vendors’ tents with boxes of leafy greens line the walkway. Objects in the app are artful, geometric 3-D shapes.
By tapping the screen, users can see what a pavilion would look like near the trees on North Avenue, or in the middle of the lawn close to Lawton Street or finally, near the park’s entrance to the library.
Winger-Bearskin said the object isn’t to find a spot for a digital pavilion. It’s to test a tool for the city and residents to communicate. She said the app could be used by developers, planners and residents to get feedback on projects.”
“In the third sprint we were trying to communicate the concept of a trade-off,” Nitzan explained. “If you move the gazebo to provide the most amount of shade, you should understand how that might limit its audience capacity. This sort of problem is common in many cities, and in many co-design issues.”
The way forward presents some exciting design challenges. Many design problems in UX design for web and mobile apps have been — if not solved, exactly — congealed into an established set of best practices. Not so for immersive media, Nitzan explained.
“It’s not about UI decisions like where the button is,” she said. “It’s ‘How can I create the 3D model in such a way as to imply our intentions? When posing spatial questions to citizens, residents, and other people, what’s the best way to communicate that information?’”
“We are using the terminology of templates,” Nitzan said, referring to the way programs like Powerpoint have different layouts designed for certain predefined use cases.
The more interactive a 3D model is, the more work needs to be done to the original data of the model. While this is certainly feasible for any given project, the fact is that each project is unique and new.
“The 3D modeling is not the scalable part of this project,” Nitzan says. “The scalable aspect is our design approach in understanding the types of planning issues recurring in cities’ design and approval processes. The more of these recurring issues we can discover and generalize, the more scalable the product will be.”
In order to make an app that is useful to for other cities, the IDEA team is trying to identify use cases that are common to many city planning and development projects, and produce tools or templates that are geared towards more universal problems.
