Immersive Freedom
Designing immersive experiences that can actually bring value to our lives
Dematerialization phenomenon
Virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technology allows us to immerse and experience the world beyond physicality or material objects. But in order to do so, there needs to be a motivation or a need that suits our everyday life far beyond entertainment.
So let’s go back in the years and try to find patterns that correlate with the technology at hand, and the potential user needs.
The paradigm coined by Russell Belk stating that “knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, we regard our possessions as part of ourselves” can no longer apply in today’s world. Since it was formulated, many technological changes have dramatically affected the way we consume, present ourselves, and communicate.
Back in the days, we witnessed a dematerialization with the adoption of the Personal Computer. Physical objects, such as mails, stationery, calendars, etc. went into a “desktop” computer.
In his more recent study Extended Self in a Digital World, Russell Belk incorporated the impact of digitization and considers an understanding of consumer sense of self in today’s technological environment. Nowadays, the act of consumption no longer requires we physically possess an object. Our music & movie collection now “has come to reside somewhere inside our digital storage devices or on servers whose location we will never know.”
The first dematerialization happened when we were looking into our devices. And now that we look through our devices — so much more of our world is about to dematerialize in a drastic way.
Dematerializing Freedom
We achieve freedom by dematerializing experiences and interactions between people and objects. We are free to go places we couldn’t go before, meet people we couldn’t meet, witness an event which deemed impossible to experience, overcome constraints a medical condition could have brought.
This segment will dive into a new level of freedom that VR/AR/MR can bring to our lives, and will provide specific use cases and examples.
Healthcare & Medicine
Immersive experiences can contribute to much effect for the success of different rehabilitation intervention therapies
Accessibility is a spectrum, not a binary
Motor Impairments
A recent study from Tel Aviv University argues that VR therapy might rehabilitate impaired limbs by allowing healthy limbs to lead “by example”.
Another study concludes that VR can be used to monitor motor deficits derived from stroke, and consequently can also be used for rehabilitation of stroke patients.
Vision Impairments
There are solutions such as Microsoft Seeing AI & Google Lookout that strive to help out visually impaired people interact with their device, and thus, with their surroundings.
And there are initiatives that even bring it up a notch by using Mixed Reality glasses connecting visually impaired people to a trained professional agent who is dedicated to further enhancing their everyday experience.
Hearing Impairments
AR can also be used to augment or substitute users’ missing senses by the use of visual or other sensory cues.
Influx is an augmented reality concept for a head-mounted display that converts sound into visual waves and graphics, as well as translate spoken words into text form. It enables users to experience the sounds of their surroundings.
There are other tools that aim to help hearing and vision impaired people enjoy a movie or a theatrical play. If you wear the headset, you can choose subtitles for films in different languages, which are then displayed in the monocular, or you can use audio description to tell the story on the screen.
There’s also an initiative that relies on sensing vibration to help the hearing impaired dance to music.
Surgery assistance
According to recent studies, 18% of U.S. physicians in 2016 had used VR for professional purposes, and 3/5 are interested in using VR for medical training and assistance. More than a half were interested in the use of VR in new medical treatments and conditions. The healthcare sector is receptive to this revolutionary technology, and surgery is one of the most active fields.
AR/VR can revolutionize future medicine providing advanced applications that cover different fields, involving:
- Teaching and Training of future physicians
- Computer-assisted surgery
- Visualization of 3D data from diagnosis
- etc.
Advantages of AR/VR technology in all of these scenarios are numerous and some of them are:
- Time and cost reduction in the training of future doctors and surgeons.
- Surgeon skill level analysis without patient injuries.
- Safe environment for both doctors and patients.
- Real-time feedback of the data during surgery planning.
- The medical assistance in remote locations.
Source: Premo
Well-being
Lack of physical activity is a key factor in many chronic diseases and health problems. Extended reality can bring enormous value to our effort of having a more healthier and active lifestyle.
Plenty of us already use technology to monitor their food/calorie intake and our physical activity throughout the day. Align this with the ever-growing trend of obesity in younger generations and we have a perfect opportunity where immersive technologies can step in for the greater good.
A study at Stanford showed that avatars influence behaviors in the real world and they can change the way we exercise or eat.
The only way out is through. While technology may have contributed to the obesity epidemic, it’s not going away anytime soon. TVs and PCs turned people into overweight, underactive consumers of information but as technology mobilizes, so will people. Augmented Reality offers a chance to engage kids with health and fitness in fun, new ways.
Source: Sean Brennan — Wired
The AHA (Augmented Human Assistant) is a university project that aims to promote exercise and active aging in elderly institutions. The augmented reality components project games on the floor where the users can interact by moving sideways or sitting and playing with the arms.
Education & Learning
AR/VR/MR can have a big impact on learning and education. There is no better way to actually learn something than having the kinesthetic experience of that knowledge.
Tell me, I’ll forget. Show me, I’ll remember. Involve me, I’ll understand
Experiential Learning
Google Expeditions is an immersive education app that allows teachers and students to explore the world through over 800 VR and 100 AR tours. We can swim with sharks, visit outer space, turn the classroom into a museum, without leaving it.
And if the media is used in the classroom, — then teachers could monitor students’ success and engagement. This could really be a game changer in the way we are educated and perceive knowledge.
Instruction and Assembly
Augmented Reality is a great medium for instructional purposes.
There are creatives such as Adam Pickard who are building different concepts that can help us assemble furniture in real time.
There are also companies such as DAQRI who strive to bring AR to professionals and their work instructions and training. They also want to empower unskilled workers from communities like the Choctaw Indians to fast and efficient training in different specialty sectors.
News & Media
In today’s media, we perceive information which is filtered through someone else’s viewpoint. And we are rarely physically in the exact location and time when a certain event happened or is about to happen. And in some cases, we wouldn’t want to imagine what has actually happened. Those factors deem the experience of a certain news event to be somewhat biased.
But what happens when we put ourselves in VR — it becomes our own experience.
Amnesty International found to be very powerful. They have been working towards involving people understand and care about the Syrian refugee crisis. They took a 360° video of barrel bombs being dropped in Aleppo and then showed it in 16 street corners in London for a day. They increased awareness, signups, and contribution by 20% in one afternoon.
Virtual and Augmented Reality could and are changing the way we perceive media. We can use real-time data rendered in AR to validate various media statements, real-time occurrences, even body language. We can now watch an interview with our favorite artist while being immersed in his/her art. The opportunities are as many as the stars shown on an AR constellation app.
Travel & Tourism
Augmented Reality can play a big role in the way we commute, travel, and discover new places.
Commuting
The nice people at Perficient Labs are working on an AR concept that generates an info panel which provides insight into local bus schedules and routes.
Since March 2017, I’ve been teaching UX Design at the New Bulgarian University. During my 2018 semester, I introduced an AR/VR experience within an urban or natural environment as a class project. One of my groups decided to design an AR prototype that helps you learn about a museum’s exhibits and a city’s landmarks at your own pace as you walk through them.
Traveling
But let’s think outside the skybox. Chris Jacobs, a fellow designer, wrote a great article on how he prototyped a flight augmented reality that helps you feed your desire on learning about the places you go through while traveling by plane.
And finally, I became a mentor to one of my students for her thesis graduation project. We came up with an AR concept that would enhance tourists’ experience by helping them out communicate in a different language and cultural setting, navigate in the open nature, and identify different plants.
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Dobrian Dobrev
User Experience Designer; Speaker at UX conferences; Writer of publications on UX Design and Information Architecture; Teacher at New Bulgarian University;
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