VR solution to your speech practice experience
Concept gif from Dribbble user Dialogue Theory
Our VR product "VirtualSpeech" recreate speech practice experience by providing real public speaking setting in VR. The goal of this project is for the team to have hands-on experience with VR practices. Within 2 weeks, we went through initial problem exploration, physical prototyping, digital prototyping and video shooting.
Project Type
Time
Team
Responsibility
School Project
2 Weeks，Oct 2019
6 Designers
Cencept, physical prototyping (teamwork), digital prototyping (teamwork)
Public speaking or presentation skills sometimes can be critical for us to get opportunities. We can practice to friends, to
mirror, but things are so different when we stand in front of a large group of audiences.
Image from Dribbble user Grant Fisher
Our VR experience provide
1) Speaker view: Users can practice in different public speaking settings depending on their needs;
2) Audience view: by tracking user gestures, movement, and voice recording, we can show users how they look like from audience's perspectives;
The team choose to solve this problem in VR experience, beccause it creates scenarios that are hard to create in real world, and enables first person immersion.
Speaker view help users to get used to real speech setting
Before we spend much time on prototypes, we tried to sketch out user story on sketch templates for AR. For sure, sketch is quick to express our idea, gather feedback, easy to modify on the go. But what I like most of this method is that this VR sketch template help designers to think out of frames, and design for user field of view based on head rotation ranges and depth perception.
Sketchs on VR storyboards
Building physical prototypes with play-doh make the team aware of the elements to include in the scenario and can also be a great way to collect feedback from other people.
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Team working together on the physical prototype
Physical Prototype
Digital prototypes is more immersive, so it helps to collect more genuine feedbacks. It also bring more clarity to the team about the complexity of developing the VR experience.
Considering that many team members don't have strong coding background, and the scenario in our product is not so complicated to build, we used A-frame to make digital prototype, instead of unity, which is more powerful yet also more time-consuming.
1. Deeper Understanding of AR/VR And Their Appliances
We studied and discussed the definition, components, ideal application cases in the class, and the practice in the project enhanced my understanding.
2. AR/VR Designing Principles
Compared to 2D experience, VR experience has many different characteristics. It leads to many special aspects of UX principles that designers need be aware of, such as constant angular size and the limited use of acceleration. The project and discussion brought me more clarity on these principles.
3. AR/VR Physical and Digital Prototyping
I got familiar with 360 VR design grid, VR storyboard template, and A-frame, a VR prototyping tool where developers can create 3D and WebVR scenes using HTML.
1. When tasks properly distributed, team collaboration can be powerful.
The team experience in this course has been great. Valerie, April, and Cindy is very good at dissecting tasks and split the work. The collaboration skills I learned in the team would be helpful to my later career.
2. I need more exploration of interaction in VR.
Our product requires user interactions such as selecting the setting they would like to practice presentation in, to pause the practice, etc, yet we spend most time creating the setting and had little time to explore interactions.
