Immersive Mobile Product Designer
Torch AR was a startup tech company working on building one of the first Augmented Reality digital products I was one of their founding Immersive Product Designers in 2018. One of my contributions included concepting and building an immersive story featuring a shopping and payment check out experience in Augmented Reality. My prototype was the featured story to launch their native application into the iOS store.
Torch AR - An Augmented Shopping Experience
The Challenge
There were a variety of AR products on the market. Torch was innovating in the creator's space with goals to build a native iOS product that would allow all users to create their unique stories in AR on their mobile devices.
Data showed emerging technology - VR and AR were on the rise. Torch learned that creating anything in 3d for VR has always been a complex and time consuming undertaking. Their goals were to remove the friction in 3d creation by building a more user friendly experience in AR which would allow users to easily create 3d concepts by leveraging emerging AR technologies on their mobile devices. With new Augmented Reality capabilities, there was an opportunity here to provide a user friendly premium AR platform that could be used by anyone.
The Goal
One of my goals as the Immersive Prototyper and Storyteller on the team was to create a story that would engage and inspire others to dive into this new emerging space. The plan was, to feature this story to launch their product onto the iOS App store and promote it on Twitter - this was an exciting opportunity!
The Process
The first step was to create a framework to show how I would approach the work. Collaborating with the stakeholders, I learned, a fundamental need was to curate a 2d and 3d themed asset library. The library would be available for users to build stories. My approach to building the asset library came from a storytellers' lens.
As I began to curate themed collections I sought high quality imagery and 3d models from various online libraries As I built the library collections I used my creativity to select a variety of relevant categories for the team to concept themed ideas like travel, nature, way finding, innovation and more.
2d Imagery
2d Architecture
2d Cities
2d Interior
2d Travel
2d Travel
2d Hotels
2d Travel
3d Models
3d Space
3d Nature
3d Innovation
3d Mapping
3d Transportation
3d Weather
3d Housewares
3d Vehicles
#d Landscape
3d Leisure
3d Bicycle
During the process there were many other areas I contributed to from testing the app, sharing feedback with the engineering team, writing onboarding instructions for new users, attending user testing sessions, reviewing the data analytics and diving into the User Interface designs to ideate on how to structure the interactions being built into the Application.
As I began to collect imagery and 3d models I saw an opportunity to begin building an interior design themed scene. This would be a good area to build a story and then compare it against other furniture apps on the market like the Ikea App, Pottery Barn and other furniture shopping apps.
2d Image
3d Model
3d model
3d Model
3d Model
3d Model
2D Image
This scene features how to change the colors of the furniture using UI elements to guide the user and custom App interactions. .