Now that we had to reconsider who we were aiming the interaction to be at we needed to make sure that the UI worked with the plaque. David went away to create a new plaque which we could use as it was important to us to make sure everything tied together Vuforia allows developers to see a star rating for the targets that they make and up until now all over our ratings had been 1 out of 5 stars. I thought it would be a good idea to go away from using a grid to using something a bit more standard for a plaque design.
David created this plaque which is the one we finalised on it had a star rating of 3 out of 5 which meant that the tracking was able to pick up the image quicker and from further away.
I liked this paque design as it was clean and simple but still provided enough information for vuforia to pick up the image and properly track it. As you can see from the target the orbiting object changed from another planet to a shuttle we iterated over a few different orbiting bodies in our concepts but went with a planet because we thought it would work until now. We changed around the sun turning it into the earth and replaced the orbiting earth with a shuttle this brought the closeness of our home planet directly into the app. The shuttle is also something that many people going to the science museum can understand so I thought it would be a good model to use.
Picture of the Spaceshuttle in Unity. Will Cottrell
I started to design some different UI layouts which presented the data in a more understandable way. It was important that the numbers were still shown in a number format and not just as bars and pie charts. The image below shows the first idea that I came up with.
Screenshot of UI. Will Cottrell
We had a hierarchy with Time Dilation on top and Velocity under neither. It was highlighted to us that these things were equally important and we need to make sure they were displayed together. The orange bar shows the velocity of the object on a loading bar to show a more visual way that counting numbers. The only issue with this UI was it didn’t really feel like it was part of the AR interaction.
This became the hardest thing for us to work with find a way to have UI be part of the AR experience. We needed to come up with a way of placing UI into the AR world. Unity allowed us to do thing like this using a thing called WorldSpaceCanvas this made the text float in real world and we could attach it to objects. This was how I managed to name the elements on screen but keep the words tracking with the object.
I had this idea that we could do something like the rings of Saturn and have the UI surround the objects the in the AR space. I didn’t initially try this idea though the first idea that I tried was to place to UI elements on to the plaque so that they were part of it but animated within AR.
UI placed on the Plaque. Will Cottrell
This shows the UI placed on the plaque it was the initial idea before I moved onto the Saturn rings idea.
The Saturn rings idea was the final idea that we settled on to use as it allowed the user to see visually the change in time dilation as well as the typographical change using numbers.
The image above shows a saturn like ring around the earth which is a circle which will load and unload depending on the current rate of time dilation as well as a world placed UI element to show the actual ratio in time dilation. The video below shows the final design that we came up with in terms of UI locations and design structure.
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