Oct. 2021 - Jan.2022
Lead Product Designer
2 Product Designer
1 Unity Engineer
UX/UI Design, User Research, Modeling
Eureka! is a project sponsored by W·Z Digital Information Technology, a company that focuses on integrating VR, AR, MR into the cultural tourism industry.
In this project, I led a team of three to create an online platform and an interactive touring experience for museum visitors based on W·Z Digital’s self-developed MR headset. Despite a few design ideas and interactive effects that cannot be achieve dued to the equipment limits, Eureka! was a decent project in terms of meeting stakeholders’ needs, and working closely with developers to maximize user experience by a MR product in a more comprehensive and sustainable way.
1. Use gamification to design memorable tour experience
2. Create ecologically friendly environment and game content
3. Design easy-to-start interactions
To make offline museum tours more attractive, we introduce a line of virtual pets or “sprites” in the gamification process. These sprites are tourist guides when users visiting one or several museums. And interactively, users can catch, release or update different sprites in their collections when they walk into different spaces.
We hope that by blending interactive fun into a tour, new visitors to museums would possibly become repeat ones.
This is a one-station information platform for all users, sprites, and museums in a local city. Visitors who are attracted by particular sprites could reserve offline visits through the platform. The release, catch, upgrade of sprites could also be achieved on this platform in “My Sprites”.
Our MR design is based on Ori, a headset independently developed by W·Z Digital in 2019. Ori can achieve 6 DOF spatial positioning, gesture recognition, and forward environment perception.
But Ori is a device still in its early development stage:
1. It only includes five interaction methods (Gaze, OK gesture, Click, Open palm, Make a fist);
2. It can not allow random drags or moves other than the preset interactions;
3. It may go wrong when users take more than one method to interact.
Corresponding, our design needs to:
1 Select simple and recognizable gestures;
2. Keep the interactions short and easy to display.
In order to know local museums visitors in different cities, we sent online questionnaires to a number of netizens via social media. Among the surveyed, 184 people responded to us.
On knowing the general situation, we conducted semi-structured interviews to get in-depth information.
Visitors to Shanghai Museum including 14 persons online and 10 persons offline were invited to share their experience.
The above four design ideas are evaluated in terms of universality, fun & intuitiveness, technical feasibility, and sustainability. Since our stakeholders need to develop a product model that appear attractive for both users and museum operators, we decided to further Idea #4.
In this product ecosystem, the online platform can help attract museum visitors by displaying current exhibitions and sprites in the local city.Users who are interested in this gamified MR experience guided by sprites could release/catch/upgrade their sprites and probably purchase merch in museums. In order to attract users back in future, museums can collaborate with designers and social organizations to produce and release new games plus sprite characters that fit various exhibition themes.
This online platform is crucial to the establishment of a sustainable product ecosystem. Attracted by popular sprites and exhibitions released on the platform could draw visitors directly to musems.Sprites newly caught by visitors in museums will display in “My Sprites”. For other sprites they already have, users can choose to release and update them while playing games in the interactive tour.
As museums need to constantly improve Mixed Reality tour experience to stay inviting, their operators demand a universal and sustainable model for long term development. So we choose an array of bronze exhibits as example to illustrate a normal guide when designing new MR experiences.
Based on previous research and findings on those bronze exhibits, we created a wireframe of the MR experience in Bronze exhibition, and made proper improvements to it after two rounds of user testing.Gave up prolonged active gestures which might bore users, added automatic triggers instead. Reduced the number of buttons on screen to prevent mistake clicks.Simplified the process to enable quick dive into the immersive tour. Added more content to beginner tutorials.
At this stage, we mainly focused on the user interactions when wearing Ori and the user flow (game scene and user interface design were temporarily left out).
I myself built up the scene and worked closely with the development team of W·Z Digital. But as shown below, the real exhibit (Ding 鼎) was temporarily replaced with a QR code in this prototype.
Step 1
Catch / Release a sprite
Step 2
To understand the game mission
Step 3
Basic tutorial & Look for ancient kitchen wares
Step 4
Upgrade the sprite
Testing Goals:
1. Check whether the existing prompts guide users to the right action.
2. Adapt interactions in experience to users’ cognition and intuition.
3. Know to which extent does the system’s feedback meets users’ expectations.
Eureka! taught me how to improve user experience with limited resource and time.
Though the MR device of W·Z Digital does not support some natural movemetnts such as drag and pull, and it can not discern the ‘OK’ gesture easily from ‘open palm’ and ‘form a fist‘, we have managed to:
1. Envision a feasible ecosystem for its sustainable development;
2. Design a clear, direct interaction process to make user control more effective.
SPECIAL THANKS
Sprites are designed by SURIYUN
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