Hololens x Skype
It's easier to show than to tell. With holograms in Skype, friends and colleagues can help you out with difficult tasks. They can see you environment as you see it and from their tablet or PC they can draw holograms in your space. Get real-time help from someone who sees what you see.
My role on the team was Senior Visual Designer working on Skype for Hololens.
For the first time ever, Microsoft HoloLens seamlessly blends high-definition holograms with your real world.
It's not often in a designer's career that you are able to work on a completely new platform, especially at the scale of a company as big as Microsoft. My time working on this project started in pre-production stage where my team and I held numerous brainstorm sessions exploring ideas of how to make communication better with holograms. There are always challenges in design, but this was a new space to explore. No longer was interaction bound to a screen, but it was now unleashed in your real space. I enjoyed thinking about new models of interaction by working in low fidelity sketches and wireframes to high fidelity visual comps, motion studies and prototypes. We were constantly diverging and then converging until our design goals became clear. I was able to contribute to our visual design principles and UX goals that eventually lead to our final feature set for the product.
As senior visual designer, I lead our production team to maintain a high quality bar for our visual design team. Before each production milestone, I accurately costed our production costs, worked closely with the production staff and would help prep the visual team to get assets ready for the milestones in order to get the development team going. I worked closely with our developers, literally sitting with them at their desk, to work through design questions and problems. Working closely with engineers was super important to our success. We were able to be design driven towards the same goals.
I was honored to represent my team's work to the world. During our Hololens announce in January 2015, I was fortunate enough to give hundreds of Skype demos, including to Matt Rosoff from Business Insider. You can read the article here.
Later in the year, I worked with our team to take our demo on the road to San Francisco for the Build Conference. Here, I worked with a designer to give on stage demo to the attendees. From my past career of working on production shoots, I was able to quickly prototype audio and visual solutions for our demo. In Cinema 4d, I took our stage designs and helped visualize the final layouts in 3D for faster iterations with our third party vendors. This helped instruct room design and final lighting. Once, the set was built, I art directed the look of the stage and worked on finalizing the lighting. There's something great about being able to not only design and work on a great product, but then being able to share it to the world.
I problem solved holographic interactions while
creating a unified visual system.
Image and video assets could be manipulated using a tap of your fingers. I designed a robust cursor system for holographic manipulation.
Learn more about Microsoft HoloLens at http://www.microsoft.com/HoloLens.