Sprint’s Pique Your Curiosity AR/VR

@ Mobile World Congress & CES

Sharing my design process for an AR/VR HoloLens experience that was used by Sprint as a live experience for several of their tradeshow booths. The goal was to make their very technical 5G information easier to understand by using immersion.

Concept rendering of the Sprint booth for MWC in LA.

Sprint hired a company, Enklu, where I worked as the designer. Enklu is an innovative startup specializing in AR/VR experiences created with their visual platform named Cloud. It was a lot of fun to develop, and I love that you actually create content while wearing a HoloLen or Oculus device.

Enklu’s web Cloud editor.

Cloud also features scripts called ‘Vines’ that make styling easy.

Timeline

Sprint’s Pique Your Curiosity AR Experience, was to be first showcased at the Mobile World Congress in Los Angeles. Then enhanced for a more extensive presentation at CES in Las Vegas.

The Challenge

Showcasing the future of the 5G-connected city in a way that captivates, informs, and astonishes guests. The next generation of wireless communication will serve as the foundation for the interconnected city of tomorrow, spanning home automation, transportation, city services, hospitals, and more. Through a combination of physical models and holographic overlays, we narrated the story of 5G to attendees, offering a sneak peek into what’s to come.

An early concept rendering of Sprint’s Pique Your Curiosity AR Experience.

The Plan

In collaboration with Sprint, we crafted a 7-scene mixed reality journey, spatially mapped to a physical model at the center of the booth. We designed the entire experience remotely, utilizing Enklu’s Cloud to create a 3D scale template of the booth. This enabled us to precisely position elements and gauge scale and depth. As a result, spatial mapping at the trade show was quick and easy, completed after major physical booth elements were in place.

Live editing the holographic scene with a 3D scan of the booth.

Mapping dimension using a 3D model.

We also didn’t limit our creativity in our narratives; we shared storyboards that required fast prototyping and even code updates to our Unity-based engine. It was exciting to move quickly with the conference deadline looming in front of us.

Creating the AR stories in my apartment.

Emphasizing a robust character-driven experience, we used story-driven vignettes to convey technical information.

Editing the coverage map with the Cloud tool.

The massive AR coverage map was a great way to show the detailed 5G coverage.

Visitors had a room sized holographic city to explore, one section at a time.

Working within the hospital section.

Enklu’s cloud based interactive platform

Enklu Cloud allows instant content modification across devices, enabling multiple developers to work in parallel. This feature helped us create a multiplayer experience suitable for 30+ people navigating the booth with HoloLenses. In real-time, developers could adjust placement, scale, and rotation simply by using their gaze, voice, and hands, without needing to remove the HoloLens.

A month before the trade show, we had 10+ people in a large proxy area experiencing the content together.

And we made a lot of adjustments to ensure people felt comfortable and weren’t waiting to check out the vignettes. Physical space wasn’t an issue, and people didn’t bump into each other.

Without Enklu Cloud reflecting all changes live, this iteration time would have increased by an order of magnitude and wouldn’t have been possible.

And one of the delightful parts of creating content in-lens is sound and voice. Cloud features voice UX. If you want to place an object, you say ‘Hey Enklu, put a tree here…’ and you get a pleasing sound that indicates success. You can also manipulate your scene with your voice, moving, scaling, and rotating. Combining this voice UX with hand gestures is a powerful and engaging toolset.

Once everything was placed and spatially mapped, we were ready for showtime! Guests intuitively navigated their AR journey, opening each chapter or location simply by selecting it with their gaze.

Each part of the city featured interactive information for exploration. Following a ‘choose your own adventure’ theme, visitors could select the concept they wanted to delve into further. We heavily utilized multimedia to enrich the stories, incorporating audio, voice, and animation. Even the Roomba in our connected home vignette had subtle sounds and followed a humorous path around the home.

Videos of the booth and visitor experience.

Visitors engaged with the Massive MIMO 5G tower.

The Results

We used a simple finger-tap feedback device to measure our success. With 1,625 visitors giving us a 92% approval rating. This was well beyond the client expectations. And it wasn’t surprising with some people spending upwards of 40 minutes in-lens.

I also collected specific feedback from the client and, more importantly, from individuals who seemed to encounter challenges with the experience. We used this feedback to make further improvements for the next tradeshow, mostly focusing on small tweaks to the scale of elements, which resulted in an even better iteration.

Feedback mechanism at the booth.

Plus, we got a few awesome HoloLens selfie videos like the one below:

Robert Brill on LinkedIn: "This is rocking my world right now at #mwc19 from Enklu…

The Future

I would love to enhance this type of experience by incorporating remote viewers who can share the experience live with you. Imagine a remote Sprint representative who could join you in VR, complete with an avatar, and engage in a conversation with you.

At first glance of the booth in action, I thought it would be great for people to also experience the AR with their phones. Enklu has a phone app that makes this trivial. We would have captured more attention to the content with phone AR as well.

If you are looking to use mixed reality to supercharge your conference presence, I encourage you to learn more by contacting Enklu at contact@enklu.com.