Objective – Create Holoportation experiences that can be used in live performances and at home collaboration
Position – Senior Industrial Designer
Contributions – Design, Prototyping, Manufacturing oversight
The Needs
Our team had identified two use cases that we could directly apply. One, was producing high quality streaming for live conferences, concerts, and other events in the virtual world. The second was using it to enhance the ways collaborators interact across digital and virtual worlds. Both are hard problems with some major deltas between the outcomes, which we will go over.
Research
The research used was based off of years and findings from our film industry partners and our direct needs to showcase the technology in the best ways possible. In addition to using our internal stakeholders as our source of truth we had found through our user research team the undeniable need for users in our metaverse platforms such as AltspaceVR for better ways of interacting and collaborating. Holoportation helped to meet many of these needs and clearly defined some of the main users we wanted to solve problems for.
Our Users
We identified 4 major users to drive our user stories:
Liver Performer
Concert Goer
Corporate Presenter
WFH Employee
User Stories
The summation of our user stories go something like this…
As a Live Performer I need to easily read a virtual crowd and quickly react to meet their desires
As a Concert Goer I expect to have the best seat in the house when attending a live event in the metaverse
As a Corporate Presenter I need to share my information and presentations in the easiest and most digestible ways for my viewers
As a WFH employee I need to be able to interact easily and naturally with my colleagues during meetings and presentations
Concerns
The tech required a lot of exploration to identify which components would meet the needs of our users. We set out to answer a large list of of questions like:
What level of fidelity is needed?
What happens outputs start to create the issue of the uncanny valley… are we able to pass it?
Should this be set up in a studio? or at Home? What is the difference?
How do we insure our users privacy is safe?
How de we insure we don’t make our users come off as ‘un savy’ users?
The list goes on, however the key takeaways here start to unravel the difference between our users that need high fidelity outputs (our studio folks) vs users looking for a purely interactions that help further communicate their needs (our corporate users). However, two overlapping non-negotiable needs between the two were privacy and easy of setup/use.
Exploration
We explored many different ways of where Holoporation would actually take place in the real world. We considered what it looked like in a permanent space and what it looked like in a temporary space. We iterated a lot… eventually landing on three major hardware applications.
The Inside Out Theater
The inside out theater is a tech packed table that focuses on our users in the corporate world. The idea is that this table exist as a conference room in its self housing a plethora of technologies to interact with. The table gives all the viewers in the best seat in the house for presentations and communication, it puts the holograms on a black surface to provide the best visual experience, and acts as a totem for viewers to stand around in multiple locations as an avatar or their real person. I had modeled many versions of the table for use to first review in VR discovering ergonomic issues, some obvious and others likes people get tired while standing for long periods of time.
We begin to build different versions of the prototype adding and subtracting new ideas to experiment with and test on users. We went a little extreme towards the end. This is were restraint in design becomes quite important. Asking what are the needs we are truly trying to solve and how are we improving our users problems in the end.
Eventually we landed on this outcome. The table provided IR tracking capabilities invisible to the human eye, lights around the edges to ensure the room met LUX requirements for VR and Holographic devices, a matte black surface to present holograms in their best light, a total of 8 high fidelity cameras covering a full 360 view of the environment ensuring folks could holoport from one table to the next across the globe, and it even had a nice hand rail to ensure users could lean in when tired or pull up a seat.
The Holoport - Under Construction
Now moving onto our Studio folks. We wanted to insure we could produce a high quality output that met cinema quality needs, but could also be easily assembled and transported all over the world. Covid became a major driver as well since many locations would require a stage hand to set up the Holoport on their own with out any onsite technical assistance from Microsoft.
The hardest complication in producing a quick assembly kit used for Holoportation was getting it to fit in a box that could be shipped and not considered a specialty size once it hit certain dimensions. This ultimately limited us to producing a booth that could only be used by one person at a time… however, we later were able to make it into a kit of parts that could be expanded on.
The Holoport is a quick assembly filming booth that allows users to receive the kit from anywhere in the world to Holoport into major live events and present. What was meant to be a small side project is now used across Microsoft for a wide array of use cases.
