Moments
Our challenge with the Moments app was to communicate and educate users about smart homes. We explored different ways to educate the user via interactive visuals and augmented reality in their space. We built multiple prototypes to get a feel for the AR and align our thinking amongst the team.
Augmented Reality
The Moments app uses AR to let users see the effects of smart home automations rendered in their own living space. My role was to design the way users would interact with virtual objects starting with a lightbulb.
“Here I simply used a UlView as an overlay between the AR layer and the Ul elements. With the sliders, we simply feed in a color and it mimicks what their space would look like as the user picks different colors.
I originally wrote a Metal Shader Function to inject into Scenekit via a Metal Technique. That produces a slighly better approximation of color lighting, but something about ios 13 stops it from working consistently.
As a next step, I will be investigating how to render multiple points of light sources with the goal of allowing the blending of different colored lights at multiple positions.”
Nathan Tsu*
Fin.
As a technology and home automation team, we were proud of the app we built and boundaries we pushed. The app existed for some time on the iOS App Store, but was eventually sunsetted as Apple released a similar feature within their iOS Home app that educates people about the benefits of automated lighting and scenes at home.
