AR Canvas

Design & Research About
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Bringing more immersive and interactive experiences into your day to day life

About.

We're on the verge of the next big shift in customer expectations. Technology like AR & VR will soon become mainstream. But there's a catch - you need to have devices that can provide you this service. With AR Canvas, Samsung wanted to make AR experiences more accessible, creative and fun to use on a daily basis. AR Canvas gives users the ability to create and share AR experiences in their own surroundings with intuitive tools.

Role.

I was part of the core team that researched and designed the app. I was one of the two lead interaction designers and the final visual design was one of my main tasks. Out of the 5 creation tools, I was responsible for the creation of the principal creative feature: Text.

Award Samsung Spot Award for Performance and Contribution to AR Canvas-Zunaira Naqvi

Discipline UI UX, New 3D Tool Creation, Scenario Creation, Research

Collaboration UX Owner (Korea), TPM (Korea), PM(India), Development R&D (India), Senior stakeholders

Brief

Immersive & Creative AR Mobile Experiences Create an app which enables AR experiences that are more accessible, creative and fun to use on a daily basis on mobile phones and which can later be extended to AR glasses. The app should aid Gen Z users in self expression, meaningful daily experiences and provide addictive fun.

Market Study

We studied 14 third party apps that provided different AR experiences and used Persistent Anchoring.

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Market Research

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Opportunity Area

How might we use AR Technology to meet our customers' needs of bonding together and sharing experiences spatially?

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AR Text Tool Creation

One of my key responsibilities was to handle the AR Text creation tool. It was the primary creation tool of our app. I collaborated with the PO(Korea), the development team(India & Korea) and the PM to build this tool.

  1. Market Research: I first worked on market research on 3D Text features in different AR apps. I subsequently moved on to researching and synthesising our target audiences' intents with using Text in various SNS apps.
  2. Font in AR: Post this, I worked on researching and selecting the best fonts to fit with the user intents and then began experimenting with them in 3D softwares to see if they were legible and maintained form with an added dimension.
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3D Text Moodboard

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4. Survey

Since all of our competitor apps mainly provided 3D extruded text, I pivoted from our original understanding that users would just want to use it with extrusion. I decided to take step back and re-evaluate if only extruded text was what the users would enjoy. I considered integrating Flat typography along with Extruded Typography in the AR Space. To validate if the users would want it and would use it- I rolled out a survey to gather some data and inputs.

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5. AR Text Final Look

The next step was to experiment with different materials, textures, patterns and animations.

Design decisions:

  • Metallic texture I began experimenting with matte textures and finally selected a metallic look. The metallic texture adds a really nice shine on the text and it behaves realistically in artificial lighting. This helps the text stand out from its background.
  • Bevel A mistake I made early on was to not add bevels to the metallic text. We initially wanted to give have sharp edges like the image on the right. It went well with our initial explorations of matte textures. Without bevels, there is no shine and reflection on the front plane and it doesn't have the metallic feel. Addition of bevels is currently under progress and will be available with the proper app launch.
  • Lighting & Shadow We wanted the text to react to natural lighting available in the scene. Due to technical limitation of the engine to do so, we provided an IBL artificial lighting for the beta version.
  • Animation We wanted the primary effects to be reactive to human gestures but it wasn't possible to implement in the first Phase. We then provided 5 different animations effects - jump, wave, hop, stretch and bounce.

The current beta app has a very basic version of our proposal. The image on the right is a reference image close to our implementation.

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The beta version of the app is available here : Galaxy Store

Worked with Samsung Electronics

Year 2020-2021

Image credits Pexels Giphy

Team Swadha Jaiswal, Vishal Jha, Zunaira Naqvi, Hema Aravindan, Sudip Roy, Lalith Varaprasad

© Zunaira Naqvi 2022