A Moment: Social MR

Three questions to the project team

What was the particular challenge of the project from a UX point of view?
The project "A Moment" faces significant user experience challenges in areas of accessibility and inclusivity, user comfort and acceptance, and privacy and security. It's imperative is to ensure that the technology is accessible and inclusive, catering to a diverse user base with different abilities and levels of technological proficiency. The project must address varied comfort levels among users regarding the sharing of such intimate data. Additionally, ensuring robust privacy and security measures is crucial due to the sensitive nature of personal bio-signals like heart rate. These aspects are vital to build trust, encourage widespread adoption, and ensure that the technology is beneficial and usable for all intended users.

What was your personal highlight in the development process? Was there an aha!-moment, was there a low point?
A significant challenge in "A Moment" was facilitating remote mixed reality (MR) space interactions. This involved swiftly sharing Augmented Reality (AR) information into another person's space and integrating AR messages into real-time conversations to enhance communication. Achieving this required sophisticated technology for quick and seamless transmission of AR data, ensuring it appears accurately in the recipient's physical environment. We also had to develop intuitive interfaces for users to easily interact with and understand AR elements during live communication, maintaining the natural flow of conversation while enriching it with virtual data.

Where do you see yourself and the project in the next five years?
The popularity of short videos has not exceeded a decade, and TikTok was only founded around 6 years ago. We believe that interactive communication and cloud storage of memories are essential for people's lives, especially for intimate relationships. Cloud storage technology combined with the advance of AI and mixed reality will bring us opportunities to optimize user experiences. Our team members will collaborate from the research field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and mixed reality technology to consumer efforts, driving further iterations and upgrades of the product. We aim to have 10,000 beta testers two years after the product launch and envision expanding this number by 2000 times in the following 5 years.