My first XR Project
By: Aarya Paatil
Tags: Business, Project Based Learning, General, Experience, Augmented Reality

A new journey is always exciting, with new hopes, new challenges, and new solutions. We start our journey full of energy and keep crossing all the hurdles that come on the way, and it keeps adding to our experience and learning for life. Recently, I concluded my first XR project as a Business Analytics and Iteraraiton Manger, and this journey was no different.

I joined the project with all the excitement and energy to learn and discover the world of XR. People are used to 3D games, 3D movies although turning point rose up in the 3D world during COVID times.

The usage of 3D tools (ARVR) is still growing but the COVID situation is greatly influencing the growth. See article by Kuldeep Singh and Hariharasudhan R to understand the impact of COVID and how it is fueling enterprise use cases.

Why is there growth in AR, VR, AI, IoT, during COVID times?

Because of this COVID, a pandemic situation had put restrictions on the gathering of people in a place. Ultimately there was a shut down of shopping malls, shut down of community places, shut down of workspaces, the whole world was under lockdown phase. All sectors of the human lifestyle were impacted. A huge strike to all sorts of businesses. What was hurting the most? It was the absence of people, being together. This is when people started hunting for ideas where augmented reality or virtual reality could create wonders and one of our colleagues presented an idea of building a collaborative tool in the XR environment. An environment where people can come together virtually and collaborate with similar experiences of being together.

The project I joined, was also around exploring new ways of working, how spatial collaboration can help in this situation. Here are my takeaways

Spatial Collaboration using XR

A quick start

We started the project with a few brilliant and proactive tech teams along with BAs, XDs, and QAs of course. We came up with the thin slice of a POC with features of registering oneself in the application, creating a 3D space with virtual boards (similar to boards in our office), and adding board items to the board. All of these features are the medium of communication between one or more people. It was not easy to come up with what set of tools can be incorporated while building a POC that will be used as a means of virtual collaboration.

Market research and requirement analysis

We did market research and studied different 3D tools that were now widely used in different sectors. In this research, we found that websites and apps for clothing, accessories, eye wearables are using the feature of virtual try-on. This gave the customers a very similar experience of trying the products virtually.

The findings of research gave us below questions:

What is it that is required while collaborating in a meeting? What are the needs of people while they are working from home? What is it that gives us the feeling of being together while being away from each other? What are the pain points of being remote and collaborating in the team in a work from the home environment? What is the setup that we are using for our work from home? How it could be easy to collaborate with each other?

With the above questions we came up with some hypotheses to be validated:

1. How is the 3D tool better than 2D tools or enhance 2D tools such as Mural, Trello, Jamboard, etc?

2. How does the ability to walk around freely enhance the meeting experience? Does it encourage more creativity? Does it increase the scope of attention? Does it answer to soon fatigue?

3. Does the tech actually deliver on its promise?

The super agile development team

And we started with the development of the features that we came up with. Building 3D space with boards in it along with board items in it was really fun. We showcased our first built slice of features to our dedicated user group who not only gave us valuable feedback but also gave insights that acted for us as food to our ideas. With the valuable insights received we kept on continuing our research and development. This was the time when we came up with the idea of adding multimedia items as the part of board items and this feature boosted up are development and Wow factor to the POC. At the same time, I learned that even though POC means proof of concept (implemented to demonstrate the capabilities) but a POC can also contain the Wow features. This was the point where we as a team displayed our agility and of course we were appreciated for the same.

Continuous Feedback and Improvement

We showcased the progress every two weeks to the user group, and by the third showcase, we have also incorporated learnings with respect to the three laid hypotheses. Tying the hypothesis to learnings helped us understand the pros and cons of the application for eg:

Placement of boards in our own space while simulating a real environment of collaboration. Audio notes are saving time of typing and also give you the feel of hearing the person out thereby you get to know that language of expression of their points with their voice tone. Images on the boards giving a visual representation give a percent scope of remembrance as there is proven theory that people are ought to remember pictures than a normal text. One of the most important learning was related to spatial memory behavior where we learned and discovered that to the board is better than 3D placement for many numbers of notes and like other special tools allows placing notes in the canvas of the whole available environment. Thus we validated the 2D boards placed in the 3D space are the better option. Accessing the app through phone or a smaller device enables the user to move around which intern is good for health also you can carry your work in your pocket. this way you can have your work from the home mobile app and open boards at the notes anytime anywhere whenever you want.

All of the learnings were part of the process while we were in the development phase. And why did we tie up the learnings to the three laid hypotheses? Because doing this gave the answers to the questions when the hypothesis was written, to understand the scope of future opportunities, strategies, and challenges. A clear vision was portrayed that how successful this app can be once developed with all the planned features.

User research and testing

To validate the hypothesis our XD’s did further user research testing and came up with the data points and statistics for the app. The user research was conducted qualitatively and quantitatively and to do that the app with minimal features was distributed with the user group and the results were collated and a report was presented.

Conclusion

This is how I completed one of my best experience of my career where I learned about the research done in the project domain, how to come up with the POC while maintaining the wow factor into it, how to validate the business strategy before marketing out to the world and ensuring the business opportunities in the near future and most important learning was being agile and responding to the received feedback.