VR Squats Game with full body tracking

Current VR headsets are immersive, but they only track users head in the virtual environment. We can make it more immersive by tracking the entire body. We made a simple squats game with full body tracking by pairing Microsoft Kinect with HTC Vive. I wrote a Unity prefab for getting the Kinect up and running with Vive.

Behavioral Prototype

This week I was testing a gesture set in the context of cooking with Ann Lin and Daisy Bao. Often when cooking by following a video recipe tutorials, users hands are messy. They do not want to touch their device to control the video playback. Having a gesture based control is a potential solution to this problem. The research questions we had were around the gesture set and not the technical set up. To test this we choose a Behavioral Prototype (a.k.a Wizard of Oz). We simulated a real-time system which would recognize in-air gestures for video control while the user cook. This was cheap rather than implementing an actual gesture recognition and image processing system and we got valuable feedback on the gesture set design. The user did not suspect the system was actually manually controlled by us. We used web-based TV remote control and faked the system response to user’s gestures.

Paper Prototype

One Bus Away is a real-time Bus ETA app which shows estimated bus arrival time at bus stops. There is a complete experience breakdown when the user has to constantly unlock their phone and check the updated ETA when they arrive at a bus stop. I saw this as an opportunity to improve this experience by pushing ETA information to a smartwatch. I paper prototyped the on-boarding journey on the phone and then pushing the ETA information on a smart watch. I user tested this prototypes and got feedback on how the interaction on a smartwatch can be improved.

Model Prototyping

This week I was testing the physical design and UI design of a stud-finder. I quickly sketched different form factors and later build them using foam blocks. I tested this design with users and learned different design improvements.

Initial sketches

Video Prototype

This week I was making a product video delineating a specific product usage scenario. I made video for a popular car sharing service Zipcar. This made storyboarded the scenes and shot the video in 1 day.

Storyboard

A quick scene list before shooting the footage.

Other Projects