AR_Stories: Feeling At Home

'AR Stories: Feeling at home' was an exploratory project with Microsoft to prototype an interactive AR experience for young people explore what home means to them.

Role: Learning Designer, UX Researcher, Co-facilitator

Client: Microsoft New England Research & Development, Cambridge, MA, USA

Lead Organisation: Engagement Lab, Emerson College, Boston, USA

Partner: 826 Boston

Learners/Users: Young people in Boston, MA

Sector: Technology

The Brief

For several years, the Engagement Lab at Emerson College, Boston, has worked with young people to create new opportunities for youth civic engagement. In early 2018, Microsoft New England Research & Development (NERD) partnered with the Engagement Lab to explore how their varied Augmented and Virtual Reality technologies could lend itself to further civic engagement among young people.

My Design Process

I joined the Engagement Lab team research and co-design the entire engagement process over a period of 3 months.

Our process started with in-depth desk research into trends in Augmented (AR), Virtual (VR), and Mixed Reality experiences, with a particular focus on how they were being used across the world to engage young people.

We discovered, that VR and AR experiences had been used in a wide range of educational, cultural, gaming, and storytelling experiences, but there was a lot of potential in tapping into mixed reality to encourage collaborative learning and meaning making among young people. As AR seemed to be better equipped at the time to handle the social needs of humans (largely because it's augmenting our current world, not trying to replace it), we defined our design brief to ask: What might an AR experience that encourages young people across the world to interact, engage, and co-create meaning with each other look like?

Working on the prompt of 'What does Home mean to you?', we prototyped a user experience where 2 young people could use Microsoft's HoloLens AR Headsets to engage with each other's stories of 'Home' virtually, interact and learn from each other in real-life, and submit new stories to a global repository of stories of 'Home'.

To collect narratives for our prototype, we partnered with 826 Boston's Writer's Room programme at the John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science to facilitate a story creation workshop. I designed this story-writing workshop to collect young people's notions, memories, and narratives of what 'home' means to them. We asked kids to bring in an object or photo that meant 'home' to them and write a short story/poem about taking inspiration from this object. We also recorded voices of the kids narrating their writing to feature in our prototype.

Working with the Engagement Lab's and Microsoft Research Lab's technology teams, we created digital renderings of the objects our story-writers had chosen, and created an interactive prototype of the AR-Stories: Feeling At Home HoloLens experience.

We finally took our prototype back to the young story writers, and finalised the app after incorporating their feedback.

An extract from the writing prompts worksheet I created to help young writer's structure their narratives.

Outcome

'AR_Stories: Feeling At Home' was designed as a prototype for a global, participatory, immersive platform that captures and communicates the complex and shared notions of home. To capture these insightful stories, we have designed scalable ideation and writing workshops, which we piloted with young students in Boston in March 2018. Through the app we prototyped for Microsoft HoloLens, young people explore what home means to them through an interactive holographic experience.

The app was showcased at the launch of The Garage in the Microsoft New England Research & Development (NERD) Center in April 2018.

Impact

During the course of the project, we helped the Microsoft HoloLens team develop the co-presence feature that offers a shared environment where youth in the same room or across the globe witness stories together and engage in conversations. While the app harnessed the power of augmented reality to create an engaging holographic experience, users were most excited by the opportunity to immerse themselves in someone else’s experience and empathise with them while reflecting on their own notions of home.

Young writers go through our brainstorming activity to capture their feelings of 'Home'.

Young writers test out the AR headsets to help us understand how best to design our interactive experience.

Notes from a participant's notebook during the training.

Young writers at the 826 Writer's Room use our writing prompts to write poems and stories on 'Home'.

A glimpse of a story inspired by the writer's dog viewed through the headset.

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