#prototyping and development

[annek]

Making Work A Work-Out: AR At The Office

Internship — Greenhouse Group

I explored the potential of augmented reality eyewear to improve quality of life, by doing desk research and designing, developing, and user testing a screenless workspace using Meta 2 AR glasses. I wrote about it on HackerNoon.

Between my bachelor’s and master’s degree, I spent six months as an intern at Greenhouse Group, a digital marketing company. I worked at the Labs department, where the potential of new technologies is explored to keep the company ahead of the market. 

My assignment was, together with another intern, to report on the current state of augmented reality glasses and to show their potential by developing a prototype AR office environment using the Meta 2. Together, we tackled this by:

Interviewing Greenhouse Group employees to identify whether there were issues in the office for which AR could be a solution. We discovered that people would like to move around more during the workday without losing productivity.

Reviewing literature on AR and user experience, and inspecting documentation of existing AR glasses. This resulted in a report for Greenhouse Group on the current state of the field, including an overview of design recommendations for AR environments.

Developing an “active, screenless AR workspace” consisting of augmented reality versions of three common office tasks: logging in, sending an e-mail, and (if you’re still sitting down for too long) taking a short break, by playing a game with a coworker. We used Blender to create 3D graphics and Unity3D with the Meta 2 SDK to develop a working prototype.

User testing our prototype with Greenhouse Group employees, most of whom said that they would be interested in using this kind of product on a regular basis once AR glasses are more lightweight.

Demonstrating our prototype at the Night of the Nerds tech event in Eindhoven.

Creating a video to showcase our project.

The article I wrote about our project was published on HackerNoon, and our story was covered by VentureBeat. Given more time, I would have liked to have implemented the feedback we got from our user tests, to further improve our prototype. It was so rewarding to hear that people would like to use the product we came up with, and I’d love to one day see our dreams become reality.

[annek]

Plumix

Education — Final Bachelor’s Project — Grade: 8

As a final project for the Computer Science & Engineering bachelor’s degree at TU/e, I worked in a (scrum) team of 10 people for 10 weeks to develop a software product. We developed Plumix, a mobile and web app which is essentially Uber for plumbers: using the mobile app, a customer can place a plumbing order, and a plumber who is near this user’s location can respond and add it to his/her planning. Additionally, the web app allows plumbers to review their administration. 

This was an assignment from a real-world client. The goal was to apply the skills I obtained throughout my bachelor’s degree. I contributed by:

Eliciting requirements from the client, resulting in an extensive User Requirements Document which I was able to translate into software design and technical requirements.

Developing the front end of the web app in Angular.

Setting up an Acceptance Test Plan and executing this with the client to ensure the software product met all its requirements.

Writing additional documentation.

For the grading of the project, the design and end-user experience were secondary to meeting all technical requirements, meaning UX was not given priority by the team. Given more time, I would have liked to improve the front end further and perform real user tests rather than only acceptance tests.

The product was unfortunately not brought to market by our client, so I cannot link to it here, but you can view our project poster (including screenshots of the web and mobile app) here.

[annek]

Geopinion

Education — Course: Web Technology — Grade: 10

As part of a group of 4 students, I created a sentiment analysis tool for Twitter. This is a web app which allows users to enter any search term and visualizes Twitter users’ sentiment about this topic. 

This was an assignment for a course on web technology. The goal was to learn to work with Node.js/Express and to create an API. The Google Maps and Twitter APIs were used for our project, and we created our own sentiment analysis REST API.

As part of a team of 3 students, I contributed to most aspects of the project, by:

Creating mock-ups as a project proposal (as shown above).

Developing the front end of the web app in Node.js.

Integrating the Google Maps API.

Developing the sentiment analysis functionality.

This resulted in a working Twitter sentiment analysis tool, shown below. The sentiment analysis and performance were secondary to learning to work with the technology, so the app was conceptually simple and not very fast. If I were to continue with this project, these would be the first aspects I would focus on. 

[annek]

Yodifier

Education — Course: Web Technology

I developed a simple, but fully responsive website that translates user input to Yoda’s “language”. I used HTML, CSS and Bootstrap for the design, and I used jQuery in combination with the “Yoda Speak” API from Mashape (which is no longer available) for the functionality. This was my first experience with Bootstrap, jQuery, and APIs.