Augmented Reality Prototyping Workshop at UX Lisbon
On May 23, 2019 I taught an augmented reality (AR) workshop to a group of 60 designers at UX Lisbon. UX Lisbon is one of Europe’s largest UX Training conferences and I was invited to give an overview of AR uses cases and then lead a prototyping exercise. Here is a recap of the experience and some AR design inspiration for you all.
I started the day by asking what people’s level of experience is with AR. The entire room of designers had used augmented reality to some extent (with one person currently playing Pokemon Go). Four people in the room had completed an AR prototype in Unity or some other developer tool, so there was an existing base of knowledge at the start of the session.
Use Cases
The workshop gives a review of current augmented reality use cases. My focus was on Education, Brand Engagement, Art & Entertainment, Social, and Annotations in situ. If you are interested in seeing a broader range of use cases from infinite screen to situation planning, I recommend Michael Hoffman’s 2018 AWE talk on Mixed Reality Use Cases.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
Next we moved on a hands-on tutorial of AR design principles. For anyone who had an iOS device that could run AR Kit, I asked them to download the Torch AR app. I gave them an orientation to the capabilities of Torch and its features. Then people experimented with AR design principles of parallax, occlusion, the z-axis, which they grasped more quickly by being able to manipulate objects in AR in real time.
I closed with a couple key items from the Google AR Guidelines, a few of which are:
- Keep users safe and aware of their environment
- Encourage movement and exploration
- Design for accessibility
The Apple AR Guidelines are also useful for people who are interested in becoming AR creators.
PROTOTYPING IN GROUPS
Next, the students applied their insights from the first part of the day to prototyping a new AR experience as a team. I wanted students to understand how using spatial presentation of information creates new opportunities for storytelling.
I gave each group a brief that they should create a tutorial to an object, a retail experience, or a children’s storybook in AR. I posted a series of the student videos on Twitter if you’re interested in seeing the full spectrum of student projects that were all created in 30 minutes or less. Here is one group’s AR creation on how to build a robot using a series of scenes.
Since this was a UX conference, I also wanted to highlight this team’s project because of they developed an appealing tutorial using only a sequence of four scenes. They were able to generate an intuitive story in an extremely short amount of time.
My goal is to inspire you to start building your own AR experiences even if they are just a sequence of four visuals. These teams made all of their demos in less than hour — what will you build in that amount of time? Or more?
Contact me if you would like a customized AR training workshop for your UX design team or conference. You can see more about my background at www.extendedmind.io.
