Field Test: Using New Technology to Appreciate the Past
Intro
For my final field test, I wanted to combine what I learned in #EMPJ and what I do every day at my job at Weight Watchers International. Weight Watchers is the leading diet in four US News and World Report categories. One of the key parts of their business is the meeting room. For members who attend meetings (others follow the program online only), they go to a meeting room once a week with other members and a Weight Watchers leader. These meetings (yes, I’m a bit biased but I also speak from a lot of experience) are in my humble opinion, awesome. They are a place for members to come together and share their experiences without judgment. When you’re trying to lose weight, they’re a great source of support. However, for some members, going into the meeting room is too intimidating and they choose to opt for the online program only.
At Weight Watchers, I write for our magazine which will be turning 50 this coming February. I love print magazines and I especially love working for one. However, the print industry has been suffering as new technologies for content consumption emerge.
Both fear of the meeting room and the decline of print products lead me to think about how I could use new technologies to renew interest in older mediums like face to face meetings and print magazines. That was the first step on my journey of 1,000. Here is what I learned along the way.
Hypothesis
My goal was to use Unity--a gaming, VR, and AR program--to create a virtual Weight Watchers meeting room resembling something like this:
I then wanted to create 3D scans of vintage Weight Watchers magazines using Trnio, a 3D scanning app for iPhone, and then place them in the virtual meeting room.
I wanted to place the covers next to open recipe pages to give the members in the virtual room the ability to interact with these older print products.
Process
The first step for me was to scan the magazines and pages which turned out to be a lot more difficult than I thought. Trnio recommends placing the object on a surface where you can remain equidistant from the object and get shots from multiple angles. I first tried this on wooden tables in conference rooms with plenty of lighting. The app picked up the wooden portion of the table, making the scans look like amorphous blobs instead of magazines. I repeated the process using white tables but got the same result.
Scan 1
Scan 2
Scan 3
Scan 4
It was clear after repeating this process that this app did not have the processing power I needed--that or I lacked the skill set--to be able to create a 3D object to be placed in my Unity meeting room.
Reevaluation
After some consideration, I decided to move forward with my project as simply designing a virtual meeting room using Unity. This would still be something beneficial to members and use new technology to help stir up excitement in an older medium.
Virtual Meeting Room
During my first try building the meeting room in Unity, I bought a building assets package from the asset store to try to create a room from scratch by laying down a plain instead of a terrain and adding the walls from the asset package. One of the most challenging things about the room creation process was learning how to really think in 3D. I had trouble getting the walls to “recognize” that the plain was the floor. I was able to add the materials I wanted to each part of the room, but could not create a true room.
What I then found in the asset store was a completed empty building. I then used one of the rooms in the building to create my meeting room. I was able to add lighting, wooden floors, a plaster ceiling, chairs, and blue walls--just like the meeting rooms I was used to. Where I had difficulty however was adding posters to the walls and getting a first person character into the room to walk around so that I could enter play mode.
What I did instead to share my room was create a screen video using QuickTime and did a narrated walkthrough:
Ideas for the Future
This project was a great learning experience. Although I didn’t achieve the goal I set out to, I came away with a greater appreciation for just how difficult using these new technologies is. I also learned that I could probably achieve my idea using different means. To better capture the magazines, I could try using a structure sensor as opposed to an app. This technology is more sophisticated and would allow me to get a more realistic capture. For the meeting room, it would benefit the member experience if the room were more realistic as opposed to built like a video game. This could be achieved by booking a meeting room for a day and using a 360 camera to capture a live meeting room. This would let members feel like they were actually there in a room and could be active participants in the meeting without actually being there.
Concluding Thoughts
Emerging technologies do not have to necessarily be enemies of the past--thought they are often framed that way. They can be our new allies in helping to preserve it. We should never fear moving forward, but we can only do so if we know where we came from.
