This week the team had 5 meetings. 2 for internal alignment, 2 for kickoff meetings with our instructor and our co-contributor Erica Cruz, and another was the producer having a conversation with Jesse Schell talking about the possibilities of the project.
1. Overview
The team is working for Art across Realities at the Pop District, and the team has decided their name on ‘XRt’, for the perfect sense of ‘XR’ and ‘(A)Rt’.
The roles and responsibilities in the team are:
- Tiange – UI
- Lena – Producer
- Jiayu – Technical Artist
- Haiyun – UX
- Chenguang – Programmer
- Glendon – Product
Glendon will also be responsible for the logo design, and Tiange will be responsible for the poster & half-sheet design.
The schedule has been determined by the team, the instructor, and the co-contributor.
There are some important points determined after talking with the instructor:
- There is no client for this project, but we do have many potential resources to reach out to.
- The audience of this project includes not only artists but also the general public. We could also consider the possibility that to deploy exhibitions if we are able to make a higher level of the final deliverable.
- We should talk to artists directly that what are their requirements if they want to make their work combined with XR.
- For field research, find some nice resources like Roadies (web3 art investment) or other companies to see what are they trying to do with digital art and XR.
2. Pre-research
Then, the team started doing field research from 3 perspectives: art, tech, and product.
The team had an internal meeting for communicating what recourse they have collected and what they have learned from it. Here are the important points summarized by each of the members from their research:
Glendon:
- Consider the location-specific art formats
- Graffiti
- Time-based media combined with locations
- Most current art/platforms do not have human interactions (visitors’ interaction)
Tiange:
- Interact with the city to see the other side of the artwork or the city
- Physical object
- Graffiti
- Installation
- AR tour of the city
- Learn more about the city, pop district, or artist
Chenguang:
- XR Museum dimensions:
- Geo-data (AR Navigation, Pokemon-go-like mini-games, artwork in the district)
- Time (Time machine)
- Multimedia (Sound, VR, Video, Scent, 2D, 3D…)
Haiyun:
- Interaction from the audience to audience, the audience to artists
- Capability for the audience to leave traces
- Communication between audience
- Competitive features from the existing virtual gallery products
- Better not build a duplicate virtual gallery from the real world
Lena:
- Virtual galleries have poor-quality of artwork (resolution).
- Weak interactions
- Experience not smooth enough
- Convenient to use
- Showcase projects for specific artwork like Mona Lisa: beyond the glass.
- A full story gives the audience a nice sense of the artwork
- Not universal enough for each piece of artwork
- Digitally created artwork could be placed in the virtual world directly.
Jiayu:
- Street art+ animation
- Require artists to produce a set of artwork.
- Geo-info mapping is key to technology (SLAM)
- AR performance
- Largely enhance performance mapping to new space.
- Tech requires motion detection or static pre-data development.
3. Competitor Defining
After researching the potential competitors, the team categorized all researched companies/projects into a table:
And then voted for the most important ones that each member considers most beneficial to do deeper research.
Each member has 6 votes and the result shows that this are the finalized list of what to research as competitors:
- HongKong XR Museum
- LARA
- Royal Caribbean
- Google arts&culture
- BOX
The team has created a Figma file to manage the research. All of the competitors will be evaluated from:
- Feature
- User Flow
- Strength
- Weakness
- Opportunities
- Visual Design
4. Week 2 Plan
For week 2, the team will start doing user research & analysis, rough ideation for the designers, and tech initialization for the programmer and technical artist. The team is going to prepare for the 1/4 walkaround happening in week 3 as well.