XRoom
Accessible Remote Museum Visit with Mobile XR
My Role
In this 48h design sprint, as the Lead Product Designer, I designed the core UX,
and led the sprint in collaboration with Engineers and Business Advisor.
Our product was awarded by investors as Championship.
What if you can't travel, have no VR goggle, but wish to visit the museums immersively?
XRoom brings the museum to your room, through your phone.
Watch our 5-minute pitch video.
XRoom is the Champion Project of the Digital Tourism Hackathon 2021, a sprint project within 48 hours.
Our team envisioned an innovative way of remote museum visiting, using simple XR technology available on mobile devices, with which the user's own room can be decorated into a customized exhibition hall, or even a digitalized painting. To demonstrate the idea, we made a prototype with Unity, Google WebXR and Figma.
With this new service, we also designed a business model with a scale-up path. We hope that with the help of our product, the tourism economy will recover very soon from the hit of the pandemic, and could even reach more people though the digitalised channels.
Why we did this?
Under the extending influence of travel restriction due to pandemic, with emerging technology like Mobile XR, we saw an opportunity to bring visitors back to the tourism industry, or rather, bring museums to the visitors's homes, easily and immersively.
Watch the web-app prototype walkthrough.
Play with the Figma prototype.
How we designed it?
We summoned a group of four: two designers and two engineers, who are all passionate about designing with the XR technology.
As a product designer, I introduced and adopted the participatory design and design sprint process to the team.
Design Sprint
-96 hours
We held an online brainstorming session.
Each team member pitched their ideas and voted for the preferred one.
-60 hours
We started sketching the user experience,
and implemented a quick demo on a scale-model with Unity Vuforia to demonstrate the core augmented experience.
-48 hours
Hackathon officially started!
We evaluated the concept with users and experts(both technological and business), and refined our design.
Meanwhile, we started market research, which later informed the business model.
-24hours
I completed designing hi-fidelity demo prototype and business model.
After final round of expert feedback, we started preparing and shooting pitch video.
Sketch on core experience
Quick demo on scale-model
-0 hours
After final pitch, we were awarded the winner team of the Digital Tourism Deephack Hackathon!
What I learnt from this?
1. Technology brings new opportunities to address new challenges.
Global pandemic has brought a sudden pause to the toursim industry which relies heavily on moving people around. Yet we discovered that with the help of cheap mobile XR technology accessible on almost any smart phone, we can tackle this new challenge by bringing the immersive experience to our users.
2. Collaboration efficiently with sketch and demo
As the product designer in a diverse team, communication and collaboration with teammates from different background is challenging. What I did was using sketch and demo(Figma or paper) to communicate my vision, and discuss around it so that I promise that each team member are on the same channel.