Experiential communication: AR for a House Incubator

Premise:

UDBS is working with East Liberty Development group to create affordable housing solutions for particular sites with the goal of creating affordances in the environment for mixed income neighborhoods that might ultimately work towards de-concentrating poverty without displacing residents.

Reality Computing will help the efforts in creating experiences, and resources that begin the conversation with residents on both the complex issues (gentrification, homeownership, financial literacy) and better communicate the scale and space for the housing designs.

Information Context:

What are we communicating?

The chronological experience of the incubator space goes through information in a step by step way: first more generalized, broadly applicable information/concepts are presented before narrowing down in specificity. The information is as follows:

1. What does homeownership entail? i.e. Homeownership as a way to start the chain for generational wealth, to shield against the displacement that often comes with gentrification, compare and contrast long term and short term benefits and shortcomings between home owning and renting, etc
2. What does homeownership in this neighborhood entail/feel like? i.e. How far are you from resources like grocery stores, bus routes, schools, green spaces, parks, etc? What is the makeup of your neighborhood in terms of people; a community of mixed income, low, long time homeowners, etc?
3. What does it feel like owning this particular proposed house design on this exact lot? i.e. What’s the view outside the window? Can you imagine your family here? How is the natural light? What choice in paneling/materials would be most cost efficient and still appeal to you?

Technical Communication Context:

How are communicating?

The information presented through the incubator is done through several mediums:

1. What does homeownership entail? Video of interviews/personal advice from homeowners, infographics to present more of the numbers, etc
2. What does homeownership in this neighborhood entail/feel like? Projection mapping of video information (possibly interactive) over a small scale physical model of the surrounding neighborhood. (one person VR experience has a smaller section of the neighborhood)
3. What does it feel like owning this particular proposed house design on this exact lot? The AR experience on a tablet of physically walking through a digital 3D model of the house placed onsite and to scale. (Visitors can see different house interiors that are have been and/or are being made and customized according to whoever is in the VR experience)

Creative Brief for AR:

Design an experience that makes sense within the context of the incubator, works well with the other technical implementations, and helps communicate the proposed house design?

Why AR?

Prospective house buyers don’t make decisions or understand what a house might feel like from just looking at static floor plans or drawn elevations, or even high fidelity renderings. There is no actual house that they can physically tour. How do you communicate spatial, location tied information? AR has a good chance at tackling that.

Within the aforementioned environment, how might one use AR to give a sense of space and scale? Of other relevant information tied to objects in space?

Onsite, the literal 1:1 scale floor plan can be delineated and a digital 3D model materialized to scale and ‘placed’ in real space on top of the outlined plan with augmented reality.

Inspiration: “One thing we’ve seen clearly is that AR is most powerful when it’s tightly coupled to the real world, and the more precisely the better,” said Clay Bavor, speaking at Google’s I/O

Design Considerations + Guidelines:

UX considerations needed for the AR onsite ‘tour’ include:

1. Onsite Discovery —
2. App start and model loading
3. Ensuring accurate scale
4. Recovery and recalibration

Side note: technical developments change quickly, keeping up with that is important because it will affect the UX

UI considerations:

1. If you continue with ARKit, there are native iOS ui assets that work will with the SDK
2. Sketch (the vector based popular industry standard for UI designers) has iOS assets to start off with

Technical Brief:

Some resources to start with:

1. Technical rundown/what’s coming next/design considerations from the Google Tango Team
2. Google’s working on Indoor positioning
3. Visual-Inertial Odometry explained + ARkit compared to ARCore

What algorithms, techniques, and systems powers AR experiences?

Different platforms/mediums/development kits leverage different combinations of tech….

…to varying degrees of “success”.

Limitations also include availability on platforms.

Budget Considerations:

While developer accounts and licenses should not be an issue, other resources might be. With a design that uses ARKit or ARCore, the hardware (iPhone 6s + or Google Pixel/Galaxy S8) is expensive enough we can’t assume residents and visitors would have it to load the app. Tablets/display phones would have to be provided.

First Semester Proposal:

The first semester’s tech/design demo was a 3D model scaled to human scale in Unity and ported as an x-code project build with the ARkit sdk inside to leverage visual inertial odometry in allowing people to walk through the ‘house’. The mobile incubator proposed will have physical markers to denote the ‘digital’ space (including a small set of stairs positioned where the house stair case would be)