Moment
Moment
Supporting conversations via mixed reality
A mixed reality system that supports conversation and memory recall, which intends to help aging adults connect with others and preserve memories in the moment.
My role: research, interface design, video prototyping
Team: Irene Alvarado, Mackenzie Cherban, Julia Petrich, Rossa Kim
Duration: 4 Months (Spring 2017)
Sponsored by Microsoft Research
The Challenge
As a team of five designers, we were asked to design a product, service or solution that demonstrates the value and differentiation of Mixed Reality by Microsoft. For this project, we focused on cognitive decline. As the population ages, cognitive decline is and will continue to be a pressing issue. As designers, we, all, will have to take care not to ignore this issue.
Research Findings
Memory Sharing: Analog to Digital
From our research, we learned that speech is not always enough to tell our stories. On the other hand, physical memories like albums take time to curate. Mobile devices enabled us to create digital memories and changed how we find them back and share them. More services started to provide content for immersive storytelling and 3D memory preserving.
Searching Media Through Conversations
In the age of digital content, the media in our collections and on the internet is difficult to sift through. Often, there is too much out there. Moment leverages searching through media. It works like a voice- assistant - but replacing the voice response with visual results.
How does Moment work?
A Machine That Learns From Conversations
In Moment, it’s not about the user conversing with the system. Instead, it relies on two users to have their natural conversation. As the system learns about the user, it facilitates a conversation with the user by pulling memory triggers (media) into the feed.
To determine any flat surface to be a workspace, users can do "bloom" gesture or press the 'mic' button.
To scroll through the feed, user can gaze to the arrow or swipe a finger left to right on the remote.
To share a media, user can gaze on the item, tap & hold and drag it to the space by gesture or the remote.
To scale or rotate the item, user can hold the item and move hands vertical or horizontal direction.
To delete the item, user can gaze on the item and swipe it from the boundries of the shared space.
Users can save their conversations as memory packets by pressing the save button on the controller.
Design Considerations
Isolating Private and Shared Spaces
To foster user autonomy and control, we built separate private and shared spaces into Moment. They allow users to decide what others can see while allowing for collaboration.
Leveraging Existing Practices of Sharing Media
We considered how users would onboard to the system using today’s tools so that Moment can begin with what is familiar. If users start to use it from now, it can help them to recall their past.
A browser extension or iOS app can help users to get started.
Designing for All in Mixed Reality
To be accessible to older adults, we explored how to maintain visual accessibility in Mixed Reality.
As we also believe that 'there is security in the tangible', we designed a remote controller. The grooves allow users to feel the direction they tracking on the pad, while mic button works as a tap-to-speak button.
To see how a physical remote would feel, we prototyped a tactile Hololens controller with Unity.
Prototyping
Low Fidelity
We developed and tested several prototypes. We started with simple paper mock-ups, and bodystorming to quickly test our ideas. We wireframed our interface with screen UX tools at first.
Among the process, we developed and tested several prototypes. We started with simple paper mock-ups, and bodystorming to quickly test our experience design ideas. After we decided on our interaction scenario, we wireframed our user interface in flat by using traditional UX tools at first.
Video Prototyping
We iterated our flat UI's on Cinema 4D to think more dimensional. Working with Cinema 4D for the first time was challenging, but it made us think beyond the screens. We designed our interface in Cinema4D, then compose it with real footage in After Effects.
First Iterations of Pinch & Drag, Scale, and Rotate Interactions
Native Hololens App
Native Hololens App
We also developed a Hololens app using Vuforia to show how our concept renders into the existing interaction patterns of Hololens.
Hololens Iterations of Pinch & Drag, Rotating, and Scaling Media
Going Forward
Learnings about Memory and Mixed Reality
With Moment, we learned the importance of user research and prototyping. We followed a user-centered research and design process while working with Mixed Reality. This helped us to see what works and what does not in our short time for prototyping. From our final prototypes, we learned:
Personal Learnings
Moment was a project that I was able to experience a rich user-centered design process and try different methods along the different stages. With Moment, I've seen not only the importance of the peer to peer communication but also working and communicating within a team.
As our project timeline was very strict and structured in terms of checkpoint deliverables, this made us start the design prototyping far later stages and relatively short period of time in the whole project duration. If I work on such a project in future, especially with a technology that I'm not familiar with, I'd definitely start prototyping earlier and use it as a research method.
From the technical perspective, while we are prototyping, we had some problems designing the user experience for Hololens. Some of these problems partly tie back to the availability of 'designer-friendly' developer documentation from Microsoft as it is not an end-consumer device. Others are due to our lack of technical capabilities to develop such interactions with tools like Unity etc. as five of us were designers. To be more successful in such a project, I think our teams should be more interdisciplinary.