Prototype of a Carnegie Mellon mixed reality tour experience to give visitors a more informative and engaging experience.
Duration
2 weeks
Team
Jayden Liu
Jasper Krarup
Lead UX Designer
Tools
Adobe Aero
After Effects
Illustrator
Photoshop
Problem
While campus tours are a wonderful way to introduce the university, the information is broad, focused on what’s on campus, and questions of student life and individual programs are limited to the knowledge of the Tartan Ambassador providing the tour.
Solution
Using technology afforded by Microsoft’s Hololens, we created an experience that conveys useful information and delighted users.
Learn about CMU Activities
Experience a Football Game
Ask Questions
Interact with CMU History
Process
01: Personas
Before starting to design our experience, we created personas of prospective visitors to campus to understand what goals and painpoints needed to be addressed in our final solution, these included students and also a parent that would accompany their student.
02: Visiting Space
We then visited the space that we wanted to design for to understand its limitations and scale and possible interactions that can occur. We noted that we did not want visitors walking directly on the field and that following the paved path would better faciliate intuitive interactions.
03: Storyboarding
Storyboarding was an essential way for us to quickly iterate on our ideas. Some questions that guided us in creating the user experience were:
- What would AR afford that you can’t experience exclusively online or in person? What would it enhance?
- How can AR make the experience enjoyable and informative?
- In the space, how do people know where to go? What directs their path?
- How can we take full advantage of what the HoloLens has to offer including visuals and sound?
- What interactions can be designed to make users feel that they can be a student here?
- What would AR afford that you can’t experience exclusively online or in person? What would it enhance?
- How can AR make the experience enjoyable and informative?
- In the space, how do people know where to go? What directs their path?
- How can we take full advantage of what the HoloLens has to offer including visuals and sound?
- What interactions can be designed to make users feel that they can be a student here?
Research Insights
Non interactive tours led users to not be engaged with information presented.
In traditional college tours, there is limited ability for visitors to interact with their environment other than by asking questions.
In physical tours, users can only experience what is currently happening on campus.
When visitors visit campus, the most activity that they can experience is what is currently happening such as a sports practice, game, or student activity so they don’t have a complete understanding of activities at CMU.
Purely virtual tours do not allow prospective students to visualize themselves being a student at Carnegie Mellon.
Prospective students can learn about history and culture at CMU online but they can’t imagine themselves experiencing and partaking in it because they are not there in person.
Systems Diagram
The interactions we designed exists within a system that includes an AR device such as the Hololens, interacting with the physical world, which projects digital information onto physical surfaces. It is also connecteed to a cloud database with stored visuals in which users can save their tour experience to access later.
