2017

Halcyon

Development
Design
Technology

idea

We started this project with a what-if question: What if we could make it easier to figure out which projects everybody is working on and with whom? This would be particularly useful when discussing company projects during meetings. No need to drag in numerous laptops, notebooks and other paraphernalia to keep track of who’s doing what. One look around the room grants you all the information you need. Additionally, we combined the projects with everyone’s Personal Development Plans (PDPs). The PDPs give a detailed overview of current as well as future projects and personal development goals within the company.

approach

We combined the impressive Mixed Reality capabilities of the Hololens with Amazon’s powerful facial recognition API’s. The result of this combination is an application that can automatically detect the meeting participants and display their projects and tasks in a holographic diagram. Mutual projects and tasks are clearly indicated with coloured arcs, allowing the organizer to see relevant similarities at a glance.

technology

This project is a proof of concept to gain experience with Microsoft’s promising new Mixed Reality Hololens technology. Some of our developers had prior experience with Unity3D, the development platform of choice for this futuristic device, allowing us to quickly build a working prototype.  

We wanted our application to require as few manual interactions as possible, so we used AWS’s Rekognition API to continuously scan for and recognize the faces of the people present in the meeting.

design

Creating a design system for this application was one of the most difficult challenges we faced in this project, since designing for a 3D environment is very different from designing for a 2D environment, such as a computer screen. There were many aspects to consider, such as perspective, depth, distortion, movement, etc. We had to make sure, for example, that the text used in the application would be readable from various distances. This is why we chose an elegant yet highly readable font and attractive, contrasting colours.