AR Garden: Personal Reminders

2021

A series of UX explorations around spatial reminders for Hololens 2.

R&D with Glowbox

About AR Garden: Personal Reminders

I was responsible for programming the app shown in this video. I worked closely with Simon Boas and Thomas Wester in its design and inception.

This research began as a series of studies in ways to guide users from somewhere to a key point in an experience using a notification. I was interested in creating subtle but clear indicators which could guide a user to key places regardless of the direction they were looking when the notification appeared.

As a team we considered use cases for spatial notifications and landed on personal reminders. These explorations take three approaches: one notifies the user to its presence when they come near, another uses a persistent field of particles and the third uses persistent notifications and pins in the space.

To realize this I used the Unity asset Shapes by Freya Holmér, Microsoft's Mixed Reality Toolkit and Unity's Visual Effects Graph in the Universal Render Pipeline.

One of my favorite pieces in these UX explorations is a radial menu that lets you access options by pressing where you'd like to place a reminder and then flicking to choose its color. The menu is inspired by videogames like Portal 2, League of Legends, and Apex Legends which utilize it for quick for non-verbal communication between players. The interaction translated very well from a 2d pointer to 6DOF input.