VRearth: Speculative Design

College Project (2022)

aakriti



Team

VRearth - Individual; Final Movie - Sanjana Danait, Rayna Arora, Chhavi Kumar, Aaditya Shete

Timeline

Sept 2022 - Dec 2022

Tools

Paper & Pen, Figma, Adobe Photoshop, iMovie

Methods

Crazy 8's, Personas, Wireframing, Design System, Hi-Fidelity Prototyping


Overview

During the fall semester of my Human-Computer Interaction studies at UMD, each student was tasked with creating an app using four randomly chosen keywords, for the INST711 Interaction Design course. Further, working in a team of 4 we showcased how each of our 4 apps could be integrated into the daily life of a fictional user. We took a speculative approach and envisioned a scenario set a millenium in the future where the app would be used on the moon.




Concept - The Thing From The Future

In order to come up with a concept for our individual apps, we played a game called "The Thing from the Future" in class. This is an award-winning imagination game that challenges players to collaboratively and competitively describe objects from a range of alternative futures.

The goal of the game is to come up with the most entertaining and thought-provoking descriptions of hypothetical objects from various future scenarios through a card game. Players must use the generated prompts to write short descriptions of objects that belong to certain societies or cultures, evoke certain emotions, and fit within a given future scenario.

The following image shows my 4 card prompts-

Thing From The Future Card Prompts

Based on these prompts, I came up with the following speculative scenario as the first cut of my concept-
"A generation later, people are lonelier and they’re longing to be around friends, to visit their hometowns, or places they’ve visited before. They now have the power to save these ‘environments’ on maps and transform their surroundings into places they long for."

This scenario went through further iterations as I worked along with my teammates to develop a scenario that could fit all of our app ideas. Based on each group members prompts, I came up with the following final scenario and app idea-

"It’s the year 3022. Humans have just moved to the moon and are longing to be on earth. VRearth is an app that gives users on the moon the power to create, save & share earth’s virtual ‘environments’ by uploading 360° views/videos or creating an artifical 3D environment. They can then enter these environments with their avatar or with a VR headset or they can also transform their surrounding via AR."




Personas

As a group, we were tasked with creating personas that would play a significant role in the final artefact of this project - the 'phone story' movie. To accomplish this, we collaborated together to develop a primary persona, as well as two secondary personas.



Primary Persona



Secondary Persona - 1



Secondary Persona - 2




Wireframes

Lo-fidelity - V1 - Crazy Eights





Lo-fidelity - V2 - Converting Desktop to Mobile Screens





Mid-fidelity Screens


Design System


Design System: Colors, Typography & Icons





Design System: Components




Hi-Fidelity Designs

App Onboarding

Homescreen

My Environments - List View

My Environments - Map View

Location Permissions

Permissions

VR Environment View

Subscription Plans


Narrative Arc

Upon completing the hi-fidelity designs, we had to merge all the group members' apps into a single story for a short film that demonstrates how our main character uses their phone throughout the day. To plan out this story, we created a 'Narrative Arc', which is a chart that outlines the film's events, timings and the emotional highs and lows of each persona.




Narrative Arc




Final Movie

To create this final short film, we integrated all 4 apps and designed the interactions necessary to seamlessly connect them together. We also included sound design to enhance the movie and give the audience more context through audio effects.