FriendsSafari
How can we use AR to break the ice and create connections between people?
Role
I am the Teaching Assistant for the graduate level course AR Design at the University of Maryland. As an instructional team, we designed and developed FriendsSafari.
Overview
**This is an on-going project.
As an instructional team, we want to prototype and develop an AR experience in class using the technology that we will introduce. FriendsSafari is an application that uses AR to break the ice and create connections between classmates.
Team
Jonathan Martin
Jason Aston
Jamie Dinh
Timeline
Jan 2024 – Present
Tools
Unity3D
Vuforia
Figma
Initial ideation
As our instructional team prepared for the AR Design course, we brainstormed about an AR experience that we could prototype and develop in class. We were all intrigued by the idea of a social interaction app that would foster interaction between people and serving as an innovate “ice breaker” activity.
We settled on exploring the question: “How can we collectively create a work of sculpture that reflects something about each person’s personality?”.
Storyboarding
With our initial design question, we started with multiple storyboards to flesh out the idea. The storyboards include several possible features, such as scavenger hunt component, or symbol matching between people to bring them together.
We have a new goal!
As we were storyboarding, we realized that our intended idea was delving into a slightly different question than our initial direction.
“How can we use AR to break the ice and create connections between people?”
Design Ideation
With our newly developed question, we again tested different design ideas using storyboards and low-fidelity prototype.
Each of us made our own idea and low-fidelity prototype, shared them in a team meeting, and picked out the elements that we like from each idea. We asked several questions, such as “What should the users use to make their sculptures?”, or “What interactions should be created between different types of objects?”.
The MVP
As we wanted to have our first playable prototype ready within a very limited timeframe, we decided to prioritize the features for the Minimum Viable Product.
We opted for the most straightforward functionalities that will randomly pair people together into teams through a scavenger hunt experience. As for the more intricate features, such as sculpture modification or shared AR experiences, we agreed to address them in the 2nd phase of development.
Building the 1st prototype
We used Unity and Vuforia’s image target to build the prototype, and Figma for the UI. To transfer the UI from Figma to Unity for a quick prototype, we used a combination of RawImage, anchor, and UnityUI interactive elements.
The experience includes 20 image targets with 20 different 3D animal models. Each 3D model will come with a hidden star, and there are 10 pairs of star. Users will be guided through the experience to find their teammate with the same star, and eventually form a team.
The team is then take their animals to a virtual world (built using Unity ProBuilder), and take a picture!
Playtesting
We brought our 1st prototype to play in class, and received lots of user feedback!
For the initial set up, we put 20 image targets in different corners of the class. We also distributed the app to build on people’s devices using TestFlight. And eventually, we were able to form 10 random teams of 2 people within the class using FriendsSafari!
User feedback
After the playtesting, we had a small session to discuss about the prototype, share our working process and gather the class’s opinions about the experience. We realized that the guidance we provided in app were not clear, and there was a lack of proper onboarding for the AR application.
We came to realize the importance of providing thoughtful onboarding for an AR experience, and how to consider UX in the realm of XR.
What next?
- Collect more user feedback and observations through user testing
- Revise our concept, design questions, and project proposal
- Decide on the 2nd development phase: what functionalities to prototype, and what are the possible techniques?