Gems is a virtual container for memories, in which the remarkable moments are stored and visualized as distinctive gemstones and can be viewed at the recording place via mixed-reality smartphone app.
Team
with Maximilian Stendler (engineer), Antje-Carolin Goldau (engineer) and Nitzan Ron (designer)
My Role
concept development, data visualization, interaction design, 3D prototyping
Tools
Unity, Cinema 4D, Particle Photon, Python & Blender, Sketch, Adobe Suite, multi-material 3D printing
In a nutshell
Problem
When visiting a place, we can only see its present scene and the happening at the moment, but barely know what happened here in the past. The memory of this place only stay in mind of encounter(s) and fades with time, leaving no trace.
Goal
The objective of this project is to add another layer to the physical space, which enable people to record, save and explore the remarkable moments on sites. The overlay of memories would provides a new perspective to a space across time.
Target Group
People who are interested save their memory in an external virtual container and would like to explore more stories of a place. The basic requirement is smartphones that support AR.
Solution
An AR application that creates a container for people to store and share their memories and experiences, visualize them, associates them with our physical surroundings, and enable people to explore ones from others.
Concept Development
Record, share, and Explore
The goal of this project is to realize the experience of recording, sharing, and exploring memory. The application will:
- enable users to record the remarkable moments when it happen
- visualize the memory
- display the visualized memory on where it happened (GPS)
- allow users to explore different memories on site
Sharable Memories in AR
We need to firstly narrow down and define what is the memory that we want to put in the AR container.
There are multiple levels of memories regards privacy/secrecy. We focused on the memories that people are willing to share publicly, even with an unknown person.
Mapping the experience
The user journey helped us to map the user experience and find out the problem that needed to be solved. The biggest challenge is taking out the phone to record a memory would disturb experiencing the moment. So we’d create a wearable device as a short cut to record a memory, that user can record the moment with the smallest action possible.
Visualize as Gemstone
We would like to visualize the memory in AR, so that they can be explored by users in a playful way.
We’ve thought of different ways of visualizing. The idea of embodied as gemstones popped up in a brainstorm. Just like memories, each gemstone is one of a kind. It’s shaped by external factors and changing with time. We think it’s a great metaphor for the unique and priceless memory.
Project Map
To optimize the cooperation between group members, I created the project map that listed out all the tasks in the project: what has been done, what is been doing, what will have to be done, as well as who is in charge of the tasks.
Recording Memory
Recording steps
Recording device
To create a better experience of recording a remarkable moment without disturbance, we don’t want users to take out their phones every time when they want to record something. Instead, we designed a wearable memory recorder, which helps to record the remarkable moment with the smallest action possible.
The necklace is made of multi-texture. To record a memory, users only have to turn the pendant toward their mouth and speak to it. The device provides a quick action to record the base of the memory, which consists of time, location, weather and sound.
Wearing the recorder
Recording by speaking to it
Technical prototype of the recorder
By means of the tilt sensor, the recorder would start recording when it’s turned up and stop when it’s turned back. Photon would then send the recorded audio to the cloud for later uploading.
Upload the recorded memory
When users are ready, they can edit their memory by adding extra text or photos, and then upload it to the app.
Memory Visualization
Every memory is one of a kind. To visualize the memory in augmented reality, we appropriate the metaphor of gemstones for its unique and pricelessness. We visualized the memorie base on their data of geoinformation, sound, images, emotion, and time. Every uploaded memory would be embodied as a “Memstone” by the following visualizing process:
#1 Shape from sound
The recorded audio track would be equally divided into 8 parts. The corners of the cube are trimmed by 8 surfaces, which are changing their angle and position according to the average energy(volume) of each part of the recorded sound track.
#2 Texture from Weather
The weather at the time of the recording is turned into the texture of the stone.
Rainy
Foggy
Thundery
Snowy
Scorching
Sunny
Cloudy
Windy
#3 Animation from Tone & Emotion
The recorded sound is turned into text using CMU Sphinx, an open-source speech recognition system. Next, with the aid of Watson Tone Analyzer, the emotions of the text are detected, and converted to the animation of the Memstones:
Joyful
Confident
Depressed
Angry
Fearful
#4 Color from pictures
In case the user uploaded a picture to their memory, the main colors of the picture are picked out and applied to the Memstone.
#5 Memory ageing
Alike real stones, Memstone gets rounder and rounder as time goes…
Prototype
We prototyped in Python to turn the data into 3D model.
Every memory is one of a kind!
Exploring Memories in MR
Exploring steps
Knock on the memstone to view details
User can view the memories as memstones through AR camera. To explore further details in it, simply use the smartphone to knock on the stone. The content of the memory would then be display.
Explore with the phone
The memories can be experienced through camera in the AR environment. The emotion(animation) of the memory shows as user gets close to it. The further details of a certain memory can be viewed by knocking on the memstone with the phone.
Prototype with Unity
Lessons learned
Cross-disciplinary Cooperation
In this project, we worked in a team across disciplinaries, including two information engineers in charge of the technical prototyping. We overcame the challenges of interdisciplinary coordination by setting up clear goals, understanding the fundamental differences, and sharing learning experiences.
Project Management
To ensure smooth cooperation within the team, I created a project road map that listed out all the involved tasks. By imported the tasks into Trello, we managed the process by to-do, doing, and done, as well as assigned them to the team members.
Visualizing Data
The topic we worked on is quite abstract, that one of the biggest challenges is to turn the intangible memories into something visible in AR. The visualization should be reasonable, yet remain mysterious to a certain degree. Through the metaphor with gemstones, we took the data of a certain memory and transform it into an experienceable "Memstone".
IxD of Augmented Reality
AR blurs the line between physical and digital. Tto create meaningful interaction, it's important to provide clues to inform users what and how to interact with. Some practical clues would be: visual, audio, and haptic feedback.