Reshaping connection and interaction with spatial design
BY KEV KATONA | MAY 3, 2024
During my career, I’ve helped design and prototype cutting-edge experiences for technologies that revolutionize the way we interact and connect with one another.
Working with the Microsoft HoloLens team, I used Unity to design and prototype over 30 augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences to make interacting with the digital world more intuitive and delightful.
Take natural language interfaces for example. These interfaces focus on intuitive inputs like a user’s voice, making sure that voice input is only collected in relevant contexts, and consistently produces expected results.
Imagine, for example, looking at an AR hologram of a drill and then using your voice to turn the drill on. Pretty straightforward, right?
However this quickly becomes complicated when users are in spatial environments with many windows and fields. Which of these windows and/or fields should be listening to voice input at any given moment? How will they know to stop listening?
To answer these questions and more, my team of user experience (UX) researchers and UX designers followed a consistent path to success:
1. Understand – We met to outline our existing research and understanding of users and their problems.
2. Ideate – We brainstormed solutions to those problems, briefly exploring each idea and documenting them for review.
3. Decide – Looking at our idea list, we would narrow down to a handful of solutions to be prototyped.
4. Prototype – I would then design and engineer these prototypes in Unity, creating tools and controls for our team to test.
5. Test – Finally, our team would evaluate the prototypes for final implementation. In some cases, we would even polish up a prototype and present it during UX research interviews for more insights.
By following this process, our team was able to solve a variety of technical challenges, from the natural language interfaces mentioned above, to how users move around in space, to finding ways to disambiguate which object a user is focused on – even with 5 or more input devices looking at different things.
I really enjoy tackling difficult technical challenges, and building solutions to cutting-edge technologies like AR and VR only elevates this further. With so many interesting technologies on the horizon, I look forward to building even more solutions to bring us closer together.
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To hear more about my work with Microsoft or how tech can improve the way we connect and interact, be sure to connect with me on LinkedIn.