Real-time embodied avatar communication. A core OS service to integrate with other platform features and all Lumin apps on Magic Leap.
Product Design Lead
Overall Design Vision
Experience Flows
Interaction Design
UI Layouts
Project Management, Task Planning, Reviews
Coordination with larger UX Team, OS patterns
Coordination with Product, SW, QA, Privacy,
Presentation to executive stakeholders
User Testing
Creative early adopters, 2018
Enterprise users, 2020
Lorena Pazmino, Principal Visual Designer
Cole Heiner, Interaction Designer
Rose Peng, Interaction Designer
Frank Hamilton, UX Prototyper
Katsu Games, UX Prototypers
More expressive than voice or video chat.
Enable spatial collaboration across distance.
A kind, ethical virtual space that respects users.
The experience needed to be built in Magic Leap's native Lumin OS to enable OS app sharing, but required more capabilities than were available in the early OS. Design for this feature required continual problem solving between UX and different SW teams. Beyond avatar behavior, Avatar Chat had unique experience needs:
1. Starting from the Social App, connecting to a Chat
2. Sharing space across remote environments once connected
3. UI to control the Chat experience once connected
We used role playing and collaboration with UX prototypers to develop organizing principles for Avatar Chat. Design for embodied communication should respect the human users behind the avatars.
We actively avoided socially-uncomfortable interactions like “shooting” other users to reveal UI, or scaling down other avatars for spatial management.
In 2019, there was a new product direction to evolve Avatar Chat towards more enterprise-ready collaboration. In Meetings, users will be able to share multiple Lumin apps and chat with both colocated and remote users at the same time. We streamlined entry flows and redesigned the Chat UI to meet these new needs. Meetings was beta released in Spring 2020.
Learning from 1.0, Meetings needed a menu that was always accessible, even with many apps and avatars moving around. I led the team to develop a new mechanic for a controller-relative menu, "Here" in the space of the user.
