WorldWhispers is an exploration of a new paradigm in augmented reality technology; purely audio AR, using the Bose AR SDK. We sought to augment the real world with contextual audio as a way to guide and educate visitors through a new city or environment. Using the then recently released Bose™ AR Frames alongside their Unity SDK, we created an iOS app that would allow users to select different stories and angles on a particular location’s history.
I led the development effort of user gestures, contributed to the design discussion, and adapted knowledge from multiple sources and Bose design guidelines.
Design Challenge
Our initial research revolved around the following questions:
- How might we make immersive experiences accessible (ability, price)?
- How might we reduce injuries from mobile phone distraction?
- How might we encourage people to walk?
- How might we allow residents to tell their story?
We focused our efforts to iterate over a single sprint, where we pitched and discussed elements regarding public space, health, entertainment, and history. We then combined value proposition design with the double-diamond process for design thinking to better understand the problem were facing and how the tools we had could solve them. We were able to benefit from the accessibility expertise of our teammate, Sunish Gupta, who helped the team understand his use of mobility technology and integrate it into our solution.
Ideation Notes
Technical Challenge
We followed many of the design recommendations given by Bose in their Design Guidelines and implemented some of their new UX paradigms of audio-focused interactions.
Our user would interact with the environment by orienting towards one of several curated stories, and would select their desired story with a simple tap on their frames.
