Oxygen Poor - AR Game
It discusses the concept of future smart home service system. Do people choose to do housework by themselves or rely on smart devices?
Role
Concept Designer
Prototype Developer
Visual Designer
Project Type
AR Interaction Design
Personal work
Tools
Unity3d，Maya, RizomUV, Adobe AI, PS, AE, Pr,
Xcode,
Timeline
2 month ( May-Jun 2021)
Overview
<Oxygen Poor> is an AR experiential game. The first entry into the AR interface represents the opening of the future smart home system. The background of the project is that global warming causes sea levels to rise, forcing people's homes to be submerged in water.
Therefore, oxygen has become a key resource for people to survive in the water. At this time, the biggest role of the smart home system is to monitor the oxygen content in the room at all times and issue early warnings in time. When our home is in the ocean, will we unscrupulously produce a lot of garbage? Can we complete housework and cleaning tasks by ourselves?
How the future Smart Home System
will change the lives ?
-1-
Project Objectives
Smart home is the future development trend, but due to the immaturity of technological development and the exaggeration of its smart value by the media, people have unlimited guesses and illusions about the home service scene. Many people try to rely entirely on smart machines for housework, but in the end they still need their own participation to end it smoothly. The steps of housework are very complicated, and the current intelligent machine system is far from being able to complete housework with human wisdom.
Autonomous labor is an important factor in the development and progress of human society. When we put all manual labor on technology, how will the future intelligent system evolve? Perhaps we can experience the future living environment in advance to reduce our dependence on technology and have the correct expectations for technological development.
Housework
How to use housework to show the relationship between future technology and labor ?
Environment
Can AR Program provide such a future environment ?
Personalization
How can visitors personalize their experience ?
Smart System
How to design a program that reflects future smart home services in AR ?
-2-
Exploratory Research
I interviewed 25-40 year olds about their daily housework experiences and their views on housework. The popularity of smart homes and the future development direction of smart home service scenarios were investigated through the second-hand information on the website.
Key points
People with clean houses are healthier than those without clean houses.
The value of domestic work is often less socially valued than wealth creation.
Smart machines do not save people's time for housework, people still need to do housework.
-3-
Opportunities
Focus on the existing living space and build immersive experience environment.
Reflect the value of housework. Improve people's awareness of environmental protection and cleanliness.
Explore the significance of future smart homes at the level of survival.
Envisioning future smart home system services
-4-
Concept Generation
Situating the Brief
Choose a scene where we need to do housework and place it in the application of the future intelligent system. I decided to develop an AR experience program.
Framing Goals
Use semantic differences to limit my solution.
Number
Individual
Multiplayer
Setting
Game
Functionality
Operation
Interface
No Interface
User
Children
Adults
Short
Long
Duration
Frequency
Once
Long
-5-
Concept Validation
My framework successfully helped me filter out a few unachievable solutions, narrowing down the type of AR program experience I want to develop. I generated a few rough concepts to consider my goals, and presented my draft concept to the instructor. For this deliverable, I propose a draft narrative of experiencing marine debris. The concept conveyed by the project needs to be embodied through scenes and interactive forms, but I have not yet figured out the technical realization process, and I found that some concept scenes cannot match the existing technology, and the realization is more difficult than expected.
This is a moment of reckoning. I considered the feasibility of the concept and decided to reset the presentation form of my AR prototype, with ‘Clean the Room’ as the main storyline to develop an immersive interactive experience.
When will people realize that they need to clean the room?
When the accumulated garbage affects the normal life of the individual, people will turn their attention to room cleaning.
What kind of messy environment has affected our lives?
Rubbish piled up in the ocean.
Conclusion
The more space trash and clutter take up, the less space we have to survive.
-6-
Formative Research
Speculative design, put forward prospects.
My presupposition is that people live in the sea，discarding rubbish will consume oxygen in the water space.
Here I see an opportunity to create a scenario where players can experience future intelligent systems at home by describing clear objects and spaces (housekeeping needs) that players can interact with. Use the functional visibility of AR to demonstrate the important uses of intelligent systems.
Then, I defined the main mission:
Create an immersive AR experience that allows people to explore, experience, reflect and discuss possible future smart home visions to promote meaningful conversations about technological dependence
-7-
Concept Refinement
Looking for the future: Since my research focuses on crossing the experience threshold and using AR to make the future more relevant, I decided to use existing technology as the basis and focus on the most important functions of intelligent systems. :alarm
Construction of the scene: any place in the home where I need to do housework to clean the ground, living room, bedroom, kitchen... so that I can explore more smart home applications
Unique specific housework scenario: In the context of the investigation of the impact of messy rooms on health, I determined the user's route of use.
-8-
Interaction Machine
1. Set up an AR immersive scene, the player enters the environment to experience life underwater
2. AR scans the floor of the room and recognizes the accumulated debris, which automatically generates the corresponding marine debris model.
3. When the smart home system recognizes that the amount of garbage in the player’s space reaches the upper limit, it will issue an alarm sound that the oxygen content is too low.
4. After the player scans the room, the system recognizes that there is no accumulation on the floor. At this time, some seagrass will be automatically generated in the AR space to form a natural ecological ocean scene.
User flow
-9-
Development
In order to convey my concept, I decided to build a complete experience prototype.
Test
Multiple Object Placement
Recognizing garbage to generate poisonous gas effects
Interaction between oxygen ‘game hp’ and alarm sound effect.
Technical Challenge
In the AR scenario I proposed, the system can identify all garbage in the room and visualize it as garbage in the ocean scene. However, the 3D scanning technology greatly limits my possibility of designing and developing AR concepts. In the existing technical environment, there is no plug-in that can accurately identify the 3D model in the AR environment.
In order to demonstrate the concept of the interactive experience that the system recognizes that marine debris is manually cleaned by people, I used another solution. Through the specified garbage model, the 2d scanning function in AR Foundation is used to achieve this effect. This interaction is the core part of the project. Without the need for interface buttons, it is most suitable for people to experience manual labor that does not rely on technology.
Design an immersive underwater experience space in AR
If you are interested in my development steps, please check my blog
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Set up interactive marine ecology in AR
Recognizing garbage to generate poisonous gas effects in AR
Design the UI interaction
behavior of AR APP
AR game homepage, buttons and marine plant model
What I learned ?
Process all relevant information collected in the research process to synthesize it to obtain the final experience prototype.
Using the method of speculative design, by looking for future application scenarios for smart home systems, it brings new ideas for current product innovation.