Immersive Underwater Farming
AR & VR Experience for Siemens
* Role: UX and Visual Design, AR and VR Experiences (note: Hyper-realistic environment is designed by technical artists)
* Opportunity: By offering a completely digital model of their underwater farm, the Digital Twins enable the Nemo's Garden team to develop, adapt, and control its underwater biospheres at scale. The ‘industrial metaverse’ offers enormous potential for Siemens to transform today’s economies and industries.
VARJO AERO for VR
For our hyper realistic VR solution, in order to achieve a high visual fidelity for professional use, the team chose to use Varjo HMD connected to Steam VR.
iPAD PRO FOR AR
For the AR version, we used iPad Pro due to the advanced displays and fast wireless connectivity - to be used in Web Summit.
INITIAL RESEARCH
Before moving into AR and VR experience design, after hearing about the project constraints, I completed a quick round of explorations. We debated whether to use MRTK or go custom, or use Vive vs. Index controllers. We also investigated existing solutions in the market we could use as ‘bar raisers’ to not just create a solution, but to impress the summit visitors.
TAILORED TO THE ENVIRONMENT
While designing the AR/ VR solutions, the summit area to be used by Siemens and differentiators of each application was critical in defining how and what we will design for the conference participants.
A welcoming, informative AR Experience
The experiences for AR and VR were designed according to platform’s differentiators and how they would then complement each other. The booth visitors were iniatially taken to the table with the AR experience and given a short intro about the ‘underwater gardening’ as a concept. We wanted to make it as easy as possible to interact on the visitor side. We crafted the solution so that exhibition staff would set the model’s placement, then the users would be able to rotate the model and visit the content placed in the hotspots. After they explored the high level 3D model of the underwater garden, they would be guided to visit the VR application for a fully immersive experience.
The initial design of the AR experience involves a 3D dice modell to express the totation and angles, which was then replaced by the actual environment created by the technical artists.
A hyper-realistic, exploratory VR experience
My workflow: Due to the project timeline (4 weeks start to delivery), development, technical artistry and experience design pieces of the project were orchestrated in parallel. Even though communication among us was crucial, we tried to facilitate in a fast and efficient manner. Analyzing this, I decided to create less sophisticated version of the initial 3D models we received and use these as wireframes (such as the diver, underwater dome environment) and add objects as placeholders as I progressed. Creating my panels in Figma, I used ShapesXR to bring all the models and panels together. I created 6 scenes to express the experience user would go through in different ‘teleport points’ within the underwater environment.
I ran an immersive design critique session with developers and our PM thanks to desining early iteration in ShapesXR (with our Quest 2 VR glasses). We went through different scenes in 1:1 scale. This helped us really empathize with our user and come up with great notes on what to improve.
I later on exported all the scenes to Unity and handed these over to our developers, which helped them understand where the teleport points will be, the panels will stand and have size guidance. I handed the panel design in Figma for high-quality implementation of the UI elements.
Our teleport points, which were placed in 6 different points (2 being inside), giving the user the ability to quickly view the dome from different angles and explore the environment. I suggested to use these teleport ‘orbs’ to prevent any possible accidents which may have happened to visitors in the exhibition area, while giving the magical (bubbly) and exploratory feeling of these anchors.
Early feedback from technical team that visited for support: ‘‘The reception has been INCREDIBLE from the users (I dare to say 1000+ on the first day, there are still 2 more days of the summit), Siemens CTO and the prime minister of Portugal also visited the XR booth.’’
Here are some early news posts on the experience:
Siemens Press Release
News Article 1