The Scotty Experience—AR Campus Tour
Project Overview
With augmented reality headsets becoming sleeker, lighter, and more convenient in daily life, the possibilities of AR integration into otherwise normal events and activities is endless. The Scotty Experience utilizes this technology and designs a better way of demonstrating Carnegie Mellon’s strengths to prospective students during campus tours.
Goals
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Have excellent campus tour quality regardless of external factors like timing or the tour guide's knowledge
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Integrate AR technology into the real world seamlessly
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Personalize the experience to cut out irrelevant information depending on the student's needs
Full process here
Timeline
2 weeks,
Fall 2021
Tools
After Effects, Adobe Aero, Blender, Figma
Skills
Prototyping, Ideation, Storyboarding,
Personas
Partner
Susan Ni
Role
Alumni Wall and Classroom Interactions, Persona,
storyboarding, 3D asset creation and animation
Problem Space
Carnegie Mellon’s current student campus tour model has limitations caused by the reliance on the tour guide system. There is a range of information student tour guides provide based on their own perspective and experiences at school, which creates inconsistency. In addition, these tours can feel like an overwhelming amount of information yet fail to provide enough depth to pique the student's personal interests. Moreover, these tours don't utilize one of CMU's best assets, alumni, to attract new students.
Timberly Williams
01. Alumni Story Walkthrough
The tour begins with a screen for prospective students to select their personalized tour experience by choosing an alumni to give the tour.
The alumni is a life sized hologram and will talk about their experience at CMU. Theres also a panel on the left that talks about the details of the alumni like graduating year, major, and what they are doing now.
02. Classroom Interaction
Prospective students can review classes at CMU. When the user enters a classroom, the person will be able to browse through a list of classes recommended by their alumni tour guide and see videos of the courses they are interested in seeing.
Once you choose your class, the user’s hololens glasses will be able to create a full projection of the class in session to provide an immersive experience.
Arthur Beck
Arthur Beck
03. Augmented Reality Interface
The tour menu will pop up if the visitor looks at their arm and they can select multiple features like share to social media, take a picture, save to bookmarks, or view the map.
Throughout the tour, the visitor is guided by appearing and disappearing signs on the floor that give people a sense of where they should be going.
04. Camera and Save Function
The camera feature allows visitor to take photos of things in AR and in the real world. These snapshots can be stored to the cloud for later access at home or for sharing with family and friends.
Arthur Beck
05. How the Technology Works
Once the visitor enters campus with the hololens on, they can connect to the CMU tour through the local wifi. Then visitors can save content to the cloud to then view the same content at home with their hololens or on their other devices.
This diagram also shows the other features of the hololens on the tour like sharing to social media, seeing where are physically located through gps tracking, taking pictures with a camera, and bookmarking things for later viewing.
Process
User Personas
01. Claire Huang
William Huang’s mother who is concerned about her son’s well-being and the school’s opportunities for him
02. William Huang
A prospective international student who wants to have a good college experience through clubs, food, and social life
03. Amy Miller
A prospective student from the Bay area who cares about school culture and building personal relationships with her peers and her instructors
Storyboarding and Ideating Interactions
Possible interactions to show...
Academics at CMU:
-User enters a classroom and sees holographic people giving lectures with students
Daily life at CMU:
-Showcase different times of day at Tepper
-Eat virtual ice cream at Millies ice cream
Opportunities at CMU:
-At the alumni wall pressing each name gives a short video or quote about Carnegie Mellon
-Showcase the JP Morgan AI Maker space to emphasize technology advancement
Prototyping
Prototype visualizations were created through drawings or 3D models built and animated in Blender. The 3D models were then imported to Adobe Aero for AR.
