I enjoy learning new design skills through side projects and experiments.

SimpleVR (Ongoing)

SimpleVR is a virtual reality storytelling tool, designed mainly for non-technical users. Anyone with a computer and phone can create their immersive stories by adding text, images, audio on top of 360 panorama images, which creates a room. Then users can connect multiple rooms by creating doors between them to tell their stories.

Storytellers can enhance their stories by guiding the reader in a room through a narrative or add a soundtrack to create a more uniform story through sound as well as gaze-activated sounds.

With SimpleVR, I have had the chance to improve my front-end development skills, understand designing for virtual reality systems for limited hardware, and most important meet with so many talented youngsters as well as education technology enthusiasts such as teachers, which are interested in using SimpleVR in their classrooms.

Snapshots from our 360 camera experiments and several EdTech events that we attended.

Poli

Poli is a platformer game, similar to Super Mario Bros, which users play a figure called "Poli".  The goal is to find Poli's mother in levels with varying game dynamics: land, sea, air. All characters and the environment are made of primitive geometric shapes inspired by Chinese shape puzzle, Tangram. 

With Poli, I learned how to develop 2D assets for character animation, Unity scripting, and what to consider when designing platformer games.

Speed-up gameplay shots from Poli

EM: Emirates Chatbot

IBM Watson Special Prize at Emirates AI/ML Hackathon

As five designers, we approached hackathon's machine learning problem with a more user-friendly and reliable way of collecting data, an end-to-end travel chatbot. In this project, I designed the dialog flow with a peer. Then I created a Hi-Fi screen for the in-flight entertainment system and prototyped the conversational interface, using Twilio and FB Messenger.

Future Voices

As four designers, we did a semester-long exploration of how technology might facilitate community-driven design futuring around shared spaces. The project began as a whimsical urban projection event in a vacant lot in Pittsburgh, and the incredible response by children pushed us to study how we might scale down the technology and bring it into classrooms.

Leisure for All

As two designers, to answer our research question "Leisure should be for everyone but is it equal for all?", we have mapped important parameters that can guide specially-abled residents to enjoy a meal out with their friends in Pittsburgh. To show the look and feel of the full visualization, we have mapped an example neighborhood from Yelp's Open Dataset.

I gained two important skills with this project. Firstly, I studied how to analyze and find emerging patterns in a dataset. Secondly, I learned how to communicate many data points in one interface.

What is Web Mashup?

To explain "What is web mashup?", I approached the topic by visualizing the process of a developer, who creates a website for making apartment search process easier and more useful.

This was my first motion design project in After Effects. Since my video was a very visual-heavy for such purpose, my biggest takeaway from this project was that minimal visuals work better to explain an abstract concept.