Augmented reality helping you to meet your friends

Two weeks ago I had a course of Multimodal Perception at USI Program. During that course my group had the opportunity to develop the concept of a mobile application that would help people find their friends. In the video above you can have a brief presentation of our concept. Initially called Friend Finder, the application would be able to show you the way to find your friends. In this aspect, the Friend Finder is very similar to Google Latitude, using GPS and maps to show where you are and how to reach your destination. Furthermore, our concept makes use of Augmented reality to enrich the reality in such a way that makes it more meaningful and supportive in order to accomplish people’s end goal. In this case, Augmented reality would allow users see through the camera of their mobile phone where the target friend would be.

Probably you have already been in the situation where you know your friend is around you, but you can’t find him. Then, what do you do? You call him and then suddenly you see yourselves talking to each other just a few meters away, right? Instead of that, Friend Finder also gives you thermal feedback about the location of your friend. This way, if your friend gets closer your mobile phone becomes warmer. On the other hand, it would become colder if you are going away from your friend.

This course was a great opportunity we had to exercise our creativity in a realistic way. During the 2 weeks for course, we had a focus group where you showed our concept. The idea was very well accepted by potential users of such application. Furthermore it was very exciting to get in closer contact with Augmented reality. I look forward to work with that again.

Some guidelines for a better rich UX

Nowadays, UX goes far beyond the desktop, right? Everybody knows that. The issue is how to design for such a diverse, unpredictable and challeguing scenario. Jennifer Tidwell adressed that issued during her session at Interaction 09. As any other list of guidelines you will probably think it is too general, maybe too obvious. So, what about join the big group and suggest some ideas? In the meanwhile take a look at Jennifer’s design patterns for rich mobile experience.

* Mobile is important: in Q108 294M mobile vs. 71M PC sales. Tens of millions of Google searches on mobile devices. 80% of those are from outside the US
* Mobile guidelines: fast -need to be responsive, minimize typing, fierce task focus –as little as you need to get done, many others.
* 98% of the world’s mobile phones are keypad phones. Focus on general purpose, always connected phones. While sales of smart phones are small, they have a disproportionate use of Web activities.
* Criteria for patterns: consensus on best practice but not too obvious, specific and buildable, does it improve life for a user (or is it just a technical convenience).
* One column layout: lay out content in a scrolling vertical stack. One of the first things to consider.
* Persistent toolbar: put the most important tools in a short menu anchored to one side of the screen: top or bottom?
* Touch tools: only show tools in response to keypress or touch, in a small, dynamic overlay.
* Item markers: use bold colors, icon and other visual differentiators in menus and lists. Most mobile conditions are not ideal: light, small screen, etc.
* Infinite List: at the bottom of the list, put an item that appends and adds to the list. Can’t load too much into a single screen.
* All in one button: a single target in a form can hold a label and an edit indicator -does two things in one.
* Two-part button: a single button or list that contains a large and small hit target each with different actions.
* Aggressive auto-completion: use whenever typing can be reduced as typing on a phone sucks.
* Text field clear button: clearing a text field with one button is very useful in mobile context.
* Share button: when people find content of interest, enable them to share it.
* Micro-loading indicators: while a page or block is loading, show a tiny progress indicator where the user tapped or clicked.
* Rich interconnections: put direct links to other apps within your app or page and prefill them with data from the users context. It’s difficult to switch apps on mobile devices.
* Data in the cloud: pull user data from networked repository. Synch automatically.

Conceiving the future!

This days all my friends are talking about Pomegranate. If you haven’t seen it. Go there first and then you come here.

After sometime exploring the website, everybody starts to laugh and think of Pomegranate as a joke. Do you think so? I don’t. The enthusiasm people get when they see it the first time is not fake.. it isn’t a joke.. people would like to have their own Pomegranate.

I was wondering, if we take the car industry as an example a car concept is the first step before we see that car on the streets. Something similar we could apply to mobile phone industry. Nokia has many concepts published on the web. Regarding Nokia I am pretty sure they are not kidding us. They are serious about Nokia Morph.

This post is just to remember us that sometimes our jokes become reality. So let’s think seriously about we have been conceiving. We will find our concepts in the stores sooner or later.