Product Manager
Nikki Chan
Designer
Jeff Chang
Engineer
Alex Duncan
HoloWeather
I collaborated with Looking Glass to make a holographic weather app using Holoplayer One, a device that actualizes 3D graphics in real space.
The weather app uses Amazon Alexa to switch forecasts and find the weather in different cities.
Ideation
HoloPlayer One uses a combination of optics, lenticular sheet and a depth sensor to make a hologram appear as if it's floating above the glass.
My role here was to design an app that demonstrates one of Holoplayer’s potential use cases. I was in charge of the visual treatment and worked with a developer to discover what interactions could make sense here. We thought a weather app was something that was both utilitarian and familiar enough to users, but also left room for some creativity.
For this first iteration, we kept the scope very small and limited it to two types of voice interaction.
Greyboxing
I used greyboxing as a way to layout and experiment with the 3D composition in Unity.
Having my renders “actually there,” allowed me to play with the composition and Z-space in a way that would’ve been harder through a computer screen. I could tilt my head to literally “peer” into my scene and get a better sense of space - something that would be harder on a 2D screen.
Hand Interaction
The Holoplayer comes with a RealSense sensor that could track your hand. One problem that a lot of users encountered was determining the depth at which their hand was in relationship to the hologram.
The solution I ended up following was designing a bird that acted as the visual representation of ones fingertip As the bird moves through the scene, a nice touch was having the Red Panda notice and ‘acknowledged’ your presence.
This visual indicator helped when we set up a scrolling behavior. Users could bring up a forecast timeline and knew just how far to place their hand in to scroll.
Voice Interaction
One of the most exciting things we did was adding voice UI with the Amazon Echo. I thought there was something compelling about being able to talk to a hologram and see it change with voice commands.
I wanted to keep it really simple to start, so there are really only two verbal commands the user can give- The name of the city or to switch to Forecast Mode.
Saying either of those is very low friction and not a huge mental load. The user is not giving a long string of verbal commands that they might forget or mess up on.
