Now that we have working AR and the basic concept together. We needed to look at creating UI. The UI needed to show how time dilation works in a simple and clear way this was going to be hard as the concept was difficult to show we decided that we would show an exaggerated version of time dilation as the difference between the earth and the sun was noticeable on a normal scale. This meant that we had some leniency in how exactly the maths worked and what we showed.
The first UI design we came up with was a design which was as true to showing that maths as much as possible. I thought it was important that we did this as I want to try and provide as much of an understanding of the concept of time dilation as well as the mathematics involved in showing how it worked.
UI designs. David Valente
These 3 images show the concept that we decided would best represent the maths and allow the user to also change the inputs into the equation to change the speed that time moves. This was so that we could make the time dilation between the sun and the earth more apparent with the accelerated time.
The only issue we had with this UI was how UI in unity was created it was really difficult to get everything to move properly and be in the correct positions. We decided that it would be a good idea to simplify the UI so that we could introduce it into Unity better. This lead to a few iterations of different layouts in Unity. The next idea we had was to simplify the UI so that a 10 year old could use the app and understand the concept of time dilation. This lead to a really simple layout for our UI shown below.
UI Design. David Valente
We took these two different designs into our crit sessions. And the feedback we received was mixed the first UI was too complicated and didn’t allow the user to fully experience the AR. The second design was too simple and looked as if we hadn’t really cared about the UI in general and didn’t really show the concept of time dilation at all.
Angus suggested we look into a way to bring the user into the interaction more. He suggested that because the user was already having to move the phone around it would be a good idea to use some of the data from the movement of the phone to allow the user to interact closer with the AR objects. This is where we were at this time. I will need to look into how to measure the distance between a real world object and a phone in AR.
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