The most obvious next design frontier
The future always excites me. I’m always interested in learning new things seeing my family grow, experiencing new things and I’m extremely fortunate that my hobby is my job and the industry is moving more rapidly than ever. The brilliant people of Design inc breakdown product design’s rapid history excellently in their Design Details interview.
And the next wave of designer will almost certainly be designing in the Virtual and Augmented Reality space. The psychology of it is fascinating, with a lot of the early work being done in gaming. But eventually it there will be even more industries coming into the space and that is what I’m really excited about and hope to take on a project like that once in my career.
It’ll be fascinating designing a physical space of content and data will completely change the way you digest information, advertise, and live.
The challenge
is how do we make immersive experiences that fully utilize the technology and involve the user? The answer is way too complex to get in at once let along a blog post, but shipping and testing people’s behavior in the short term will be super important. Studying human’s mental and physical psychology to VR and AR will be an art in itself.
From my very rough, short observations from demos and videos I’ve been able to pick up on some fundamentals:
We experience things that are directly in front of us and reaching for things disorientates your balance and perception, so keeping things in your direct frontal orientation is important.
For early adoption, it’s super important to give people experiences that they are familiar with and the on-boarding process has to be short so the learning curve isn’t very high, much like product design.
VR is very isolating. Making it inclusive and giving you the option for it to become social or not is key. I’ve heard it referenced that the ideal usage is 30- 1 hour because essentially you’ve got a helmet on and losing yourself in these “spaces” for too long, we’re probably teetering into the Inception psycho space.
The Hololens is something I’m getting really excited about.
It’s worth a whole post alone, but I could really see myself in the AR space more as it is more integrated into your physical world and to me, it makes your spaces even bigger.
In my case, I’d love designing specifically designed web content for these platforms as I believe they really have no bounds. Your canvas is the world in front of you, we're just renting them for the time that we have.
Minority Report is an excellent example of curated experiences that are geo-located. I'm not entirely sure we can get there with speed, but the easier application to me would be personal curation rather than AI. And I think that personal homes is where you start.
The Internet of Things is already creeping up on us and AR would be a great supplement to AR. I would be very cautious of doing it in public spaces. There might have to be blocked off area (large ones at that) for something like AR Twitter.
Could you imagine people bumping into each other trying to organize content on their public spaces, it could be a mess with screens overlapping each other. Ugh.
Also time is something that makes AR more appealing to me. In the AR realm, its incorporated into your everyday, so using it intermittently throughout the day for 5 min up to an hour or 2 is even more plausible when you think of the work/office space. It’s always a dream for designers to have things widely adopted by people that are using it in their everyday routine.
I’m starting to draft some websites I use a lot and reapplying them to an AR space, I’ll share my research soon. It’s been pretty fascinating thus far.