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Prototypes

Ryan Lay

Dec 27, 2023

 

A Field Trip

 

The new year started off strong with a trip to the site where the AR app will be launched. Afterall, there’s no better way to immerse yourself in San Diego than by being there in-person. This also gives us a better sense of the scenery we’d be designing around.

 

After scouting the area, we found that visual positioning system (VPS) scans of some locations were difficult but not impossible to get “fair” qualities on.

 

UI/UX App Design

 

To prepare for AR development we started off by iterating from low fidelity to high fidelity prototypes for each of the 4 experiences we chose:

 

  1. Living Oak

  2. Pollinator Garden

  3. Mushroom Cottage

  4. Underground Portal

 

Below is an example of the Living Oak experience.

Around the same time, the Balboa Park Live site map was finished.

Living Oak

On the E-Book side of production, we created a self-guided exploration of different experiences of animals that depend on the live oak, a keystone species of San Diego. The story content here rests on the “collector” role of the audience and tasks them with collecting 4 of the 6 collectible objects taking them on a journey to learn about: 

 

  • owls and their silent but deadly hunting strategies

  • trees and their ability to find water

  • oaks and how the Kumeyaay people cultivated them

  • birds and their built-in compass

  • snakes and their thermal vision

  • bees with their “waggle dance”

  • and more!

AR Prototypes

Shortly after the designs were sketched out, our developer team worked on AR prototypes of the different mechanics. Culminating in exciting progress on all fronts.

Through our prototyping phase, we discovered 2 algorithms for AR anchoring in real space. That is VPS and Plane Detection. We implemented both to see which would have better location tracking. Both seemed to have their merits and demerits. At the end of the day, we opted for VPS due to the faster acquisition.

 

Plane detection takes a minute to take effect as demonstrated by the first seed I throw falling through the earth forever, however once it gets a hold of a plane it works well.  I have noticed some issues where my finger or something passes by the camera and it detects a plane high above the ground that doesn’t seem to go away.

 

One sort of funny quirk about VPS though, since I’ve only scanned that spot once at a specific time of day.  I couldn’t localize it to test that scene out for a couple hours because I had to wait for the shadow of the apartments to line back up with the scan.  We’ll have to keep this in mind when designing for the park and test the app out throughout the day, rescanning at times where it doesn’t work. (Jarnke)

While the anchoring was being explored, other members of the lab worked on hand tracking prototypes. As the prototypes became more usable, ideas for gamifying hand tracking quickly followed. Some ideas that we considered were:

 

  1. Bee: using a bee as a navigation aid, having the bee communicate with waggles while you have your hand out.

  2. Bat: using hand tracking as a portable diorama, having an interactive narrative take place in the palm of your hand.

  3. Scrub Jay: a memory based game to interactively demonstrate the food stashing behavior of jays