Immersive Interview with Ana Garcia Puyol
Ana is the Director of User Experience and Integration at IrisVR, where she researches, plans, and designs user experience features within the company’s virtual reality software ecosystem.
So, you are from Spain, and now you are working and living in New York. How long have you been in the US?
I have been here for the last six years, but I also spent one year before that as an exchange student. So, all combined, about seven years.
Interesting. It’s the all-time question for people in the AR/VR industry. From one point of view, the US is the right place to work, but a lot of people prefer Europe for personal reasons. What is better for you?
For me, it wasn’t a decision like that. I came to the US to do a master, and then I started learning about opportunities in fields that didn’t exist in Europe, so I stayed. From my experience, the greatest source of innovation is the US, and particularly New York for what we do at IrisVR.
Did you work in architecture after your studies?
I worked for my teachers while I was in school in Spain. When I graduated, I moved to Germany. I was working in Munich for a little over six months. Also with some classmates, we won a competition in Japan, so we spent a summer in Tokyo and built a house in Hokkaido.
How did you transition into VR?
After I tried the Google Cardboard a few years ago, I realized that it was going to be such a game changer for architects, who were going to be able to share their projects with clients easily. That was something that I decided I wanted to work on. Soon after, I moved to New York and started working for Thornton Tomasetti, a structural engineering company. The team I was part of was doing research and development and at that time we were building some tools to view BIM models on the web. Using three.js, I expanded the capabilities of our viewer for VR collaboration by having multiple people join a session. Eventually, I met Shane Scranton, the CEO of IrisVR, and joined the company a bit over 2 years ago.
Is Iris web based?
No, the VR experience is built on top of Unity.
What is the structure of your team?
Right now we are around 25 people, and most of our team is composed of software engineers. In the design team, we are currently three people. We also have teams for marketing, sales and customer experience.
How does your daily process look like?
There’s always one or two meetings… I do sketches in a notebook or on a whiteboard and I mostly design with Sketch on my Mac and share mockups with inVision. We are also using Google Docs, which is great for sharing information that everyone has access to and can comment on. I write there UX flows. We are looking at how architects, or designers in general, are doing a particular task, and we are coming up with ideas for what we can do on our end to improve that workflow by means of virtual reality.
You mentioned Sketch. Did you mean Sketch App for designing UI, or SketchUp for 3D?
I meant Sketch, the app for designing UI. Some of our users model their projects in 3D using SketchUp.
What kind of positions do you have in your team?
I do User Experience in general. One of my colleagues has been doing more UI and interaction design. Another has been focused on our web’s look and feel. We make sketches, mockups, and occasionally Unity prototypes that show how a tool or feature is supposed to work. The Unity team of developers implements the code that goes into the final product.
Are you working with augmented reality or your primary focus is virtual reality?
I can only say that I’m conducting research on AR and I’m very excited about it.
I saw the article on your blog about demos on the client side. What reactions do you usually get?
It is really mind-blowing for our users. They get it right away. That ability that VR has to take you away from where you are is really fascinating. What I’ve seen is a combination of a ‘wow’ moment and an “oh, I now see my building” kind of reaction. And this is amazing.
It’s so great to see how first-time users are getting experiences so easily. Especially for your users that spend months or years designing a building. It is great to see it in real scale.
This is one of the most pleasant experiences for me. For the house that we built in Japan, we made a 3D model. It was five years ago. When I joined Iris in 2016, I brought the model with me, and I launched it in VR. I was so impressed. I knew the house really well: the geometry, the materials, I had seen it during construction… I even got chance to spend a couple of nights there. When I saw it in VR, I knew that what Iris had been building worked, it was immersive and true to scale, and I had just joined an incredibly talented team that would continue to improve it and make it accessible to more people. What we want to do is very meaningful for architects, and especially for clients, because most people don’t understand plans and sections, or sketches. As a designer, you have to present your ideas clearly, in a way that is self-explanatory for the end user, the client. VR gives you that and, in our case, instantly.
Architects are spending a lot of time creating a project of a building and after that, even more time is spent during construction. The feeling when you are coming to the construction site is so exciting because you can see here and there details from your project making it into reality. But if you can have it in seconds in 1:1 scale, it’s absolutely mind-blowing.
What I like about architecture and find almost poetic is that architects don’t make houses, they make happy families. That’s a dream, the ideal scenario. The reality of the profession is a little bit detached from that, but the idea is that architecture is less about the physicality of space, but more about what you can achieve with it. So, you can think of something to build, but it can take 3 to 5 years to get there. With virtual reality, you can get to that moment way before. You can guide somebody through a house and say “this is how your family will live in two years. See it now”. You are bringing the future to the present.
If you could, what career advice would you offer to your younger self?
The amount of work and the sleepless nights that you have to do during school for what the professional life of an architect offers is unnecessary, in my opinion. I just read an article that the new generation of architects that are finishing school now are taking courses in other fields, such as business, entrepreneurship and technology. I would tell myself something along the lines of “go and learn how to code as soon as possible”.
Yeah, code is the new english.
Exactly. You don’t have to be an expert, but everything is pretty much digital these days and you have to be able to “speak” programming even just a little bit. You can be a good designer, but you will most likely work with engineers. Understanding on a certain level the complexity of developing a product is incredibly useful.
The other one that I continue to discuss with my friends here is that I don’t think that schools teach you how to work with others. Good communication and collaboration skills are underrated. So instead of memorizing so many things, I would rather put more effort into teaching students soft skills, because that’s what builds success in a world where collaboration is key.
What are the most required skills for guys who want to start designing for VR?
That’s something that we are having a hard time defining. I would say that having the ability to prototype in Unity is a big one. If you can do this, it means that you have a feel for UI, certain skills in 3D modeling and a sense of which interactions work and which don’t. The other part I’d say is related to understanding how people communicate and move. I think that’s where a background in architecture really helps because you have an understanding of 3D, distances, and relationships to objects, and how people are expected to navigate those spaces. All in all, VR is still a very new medium, so it’s hard to define.
It’s like combining everything. I can say that architecture is very useful for different fields. My work in architecture helped me a lot to become a good UX designer. And when I entered VR/AR, I already knew 3D software, understood scales, volumes and so one.
BTW I found your position on Jobs in MR website, and the title was “VR UX Design Lead”. As usual teams in AR/VR are very small and very good if there is at least single designer. But for me “lead” means that you have at least few designers, so I decided to contact you. So do you really have such separation?
Right now the team is relatively small. Still, for this position, we are trying to hire someone who is more senior, someone who can come up with ideas and present them efficiently.
I hope this interview will help you to find the right person. Inborn X is the good place to find UX AR/VR designers (Description of the position. Apply if you want to build the excellent product for architects).
How about hardware? What are you using for VR, Vive or Oculus?
All of us have an Oculus Rift on our desks, and then we have few HTC Vives for demos. I don’t have any preferences. I do like them both.
Are you working now a lot on 360 VR or mostly on room-scale VR?
Panoramic images are supported in our mobile app Scope. At the moment, our efforts are focused on improving immersive collaboration, and this is done with Prospect.
What do you think about the future of VR?
I find fascinating that when I finished Architecture school in Spain in 2011, I could have never imagined that I would be working in VR. When I graduated from Harvard four years ago this job didn’t exist yet. The moment we are living in is really great, we can create our own jobs. I guess that’s always been true in a sense, but not at this scale. The digital world is so open ended. We continue to evolve and create new things. For example, you can tell stories now using threads on Twitter. That’s a new medium for storytelling that didn’t exist before and it seems to be very powerful. I continue to wonder how virtual reality will evolve to help us get information in a different way. Who knows!
I’m also looking forward to what we build. And the community is very open. I met a lot of people that are ready to help with advice and practical help.
You never know who you will end up working or collaborating with. And the internet is helping immensely. Just a few years ago there was no way that I would have been here talking to you on a call between New York and Prague considering we don’t have any professional links.
Ten years ago we were architects and would never think that we could build such things and have a chat about it.
You’re right. It’s very empowering. Now we can be creators.
This story is part of series Immersive Interviews. If you are also VR/AR designer, and you have what to say (I’m sure that you have) drop me a line on email or Twitter.
