Client: Lenovo

Role: Lead Designer

Project Type: Virtual Reality Education

Hardware: Mirage Solo

OS: Google Daydream

Platform: Unity Engine

When the very first virtual reality technology burst onto the scene in 1968, the world felt that it had suddenly entered the future. Virtual reality meant the next wave of human experience was here, and in no time at all you would be able to step into a virtual world so immersive that you wouldn’t even be able to distinguish it from reality.

A little more than 50 years later and we’re still working out all the bugs.

As part of Lenovo’s push to embrace up-and-coming technology and innovation, I was part of an ambitious project to create a functional proof-of-concept virtual reality training program for educating hardware engineers on new products in real-time. The goal was to begin testing the limits of what it takes to create virtual worlds, and how much we can really do to enable users to learn kinesthetically without ever touching a real piece of hardware.

To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have removed & altered any confidential information in this portfolio entry.

The Challenge

Create an Experimental VR Training Program to Establish Design & Development Standards in DCG… From Scratch

The core goal of our project was one of discovery. This was as much an experiment as it was a product that needed to generate a return on investment, and we were aiming our sighs high. The original premise was simple: there’s no better way to find out what a technology is capable of than trying to build something viable with it. However, we didn’t plan on starting in on a project straight away. The first phase was going to be a heavy research push to really discover what was viable and ideal for development.

Our core goals were to:

1. Outline the most effective form of education for teaching hands-on and information-rich tasks.

2. Discover if virtual reality & the associated hardware is capable of replicating hands-on tasks to a level that accurately mimics reality.

3. Define & produce a minimum-viable-product educational tool in virtual reality capable of replacing hands-on training while only using internal resources to establish testing abilities & market opportunities.

That’s right. We couldn’t farm out our 3D models, our animations, or anything else. This project was truly going from 0 to 100. And we didn’t even know if it was going to work.

My Role

I led the research, design, prototyping, and production of the Forge Labs VR Training project from between September 2018 and March 2019. I had a team of one full-time senior developer and one part-time developer and a project manager/scrum master to keep us all on time and reporting to the right people.

I worked on the project from inception through user testing and internal launch, at which point I put together a full research report on the project for analysis by other teams. The Forge Labs VR Training Project ended when Google stopped development of their Daydream platform and the Mirage Solo ceased production, but the lessons learned from it have gone on to inform numerous VR projects within Lenovo.

Framing the Problem

Getting the Keys to Better Understanding

Armed firmly with the knowledge that we could, in theory, create a virtual reality experience to replicate the learning methods of hands-on technical training, we had to stop and as ourselves: why would we?

There were four main payoffs for creating a digital learning space for technicians, and these established our four pillars of product design moving forward. The were:

1. Technicians need ready, easily-accessible education from experts, and they need it globally because they’re a global force.

2. There are precious few experts for new technology when it first emerges, and they usually aren’t educators. In addition, they usually don’t have the time to fly out and educate technicians 1-on-1.

3. Getting hands-on education means getting your hands on hardware. And it’s not easy or cheap to ship out 7,000 pound hardware to every country on earth multiple times a year.

4. Hands-on learning is essential because of the detail associated with small hardware. The subtle visual and tactile details about the hardware are what will make or break a technician’s experience for a customer.

If we could knock out all three of these with our training program, it would be a massive success. If we could get VR to replicate the effectiveness of hands-on training well enough, we could distribute it globally on headsets as app updates, negating the need to move man and machine across the globe to meet with technicians one-on-one.

We now knew what success looked like. But we needed to know if the hardware was up to the challenge.

Understanding the Users

Creating Mental Models, Personas, and Maps

Moving forward with the project, we had captured pain points for our users en-masse, but I knew we had to capture user behavior in context as well. Your standard educational program has three basic user sets, and these applied here as well:

1. Students (technicians)

2. Teachers (content creators)

3. Grade-Keepers (managers)

Interviews with users helped outline our user base’s motivations and goals, and in turn helped define the journey maps and happy-path flows for the project. I joined the user journeys into a functional application map after a quick task analysis, and used it to create a structure of functions needed to develop the program. These were in turn handed off to our developers who dove head-first into finding if there was a platform that would support all the features I had designed. They quickly hit on one that was an open-source development tool: Unity. Knowing our technical limitations, we then moved into structural design.

Design & Development

Finding the Path of Best Fidelity

In order to optimize our application and get it functioning correctly the first time, we needed an accurate construction document. And to get that, we still needed to reconcile what hardware we were going to use. Laborious testing from the development team with haptic feedback gloves revealed numerous incompatibility issues with feedback and connectivity, meaning we were going to design to a single remote function for our first POC. With this in mind, I created two sets of wireframes for the application: one for a Daydream remote, and another for the upcoming Google multi-function controllers which we could incorporate to the program in later iterations.

Without much debate, the team agreed to the flexible design pattern, and with our first outlines created I set myself to hunting down internal 3D assets for pre-existing hardware. An important part of developing in 3D is that you need to have 3D assets, and we needed them for advanced hardware down to the last nut and bolt. Luckily, we found them, and then pioneered a way to optimize the massive files for use in a lightweight untethered headset.

Wireframes & Prototypes

When UI/UX in VR is Partly Architecture

Working off of educational standards and calling in local experts on educational training, I created a vocal script to match the wireframes and storyboarding, going so far as to define every last binary positive and negative action and reaction that was possible in the 3D space. A lot of what could be considered designable functions were in fact not, because the goal of the entire project was to mimmic real life as closely as possible. This meant that every action had to have a realistic, predictable reaction within the program.

The only question became: when do we add to that? This assisted reality is what defined the power of VR, and how we could make up for the educational gap that our somewhat limited hardware would make. This was one of the big technical standards that we laid out for the company moving forward: what does interaction in virtual reality look like for us? How do we use color, texture, sound, and light? I created a full guide for developers moving forward to help them skip the massive amounts of research I did in the interim to figure out just what best practices meant.

Establishing Core Content

Training Unit Goals

As I worked in scripts, wireframes, and step-by-step processes for the design, the goals of the training themselves became more and more a point of core importance. Working with our contacts on the educational services team, we established these core goals that would measure the training’s success, and this provide a metric for the project as a whole:

1. To walk a user, step-by-step, through the complete replacement of a defective server.

2. To have the user understand the actions they are taking as they are performed.

3. To have the user remember and recall their actions after leaving the training unit.

4. To have the user be able to replicate the steps in the training in a real-world replacement scenario.

5. To have a fully immersive, realistic environment that successfully replicates the server replacement experience to the best of its ability.

As the project progressed, three main waves of storyboards were created along our timeline.

1. The first was a quick vision storyboard to articulate the idea of what VR training would be and achieve.

2. The second was a third-person environment design and loading sequence.

3. The third was a 54 item-by-item, action-by-action rendering in first-person of what the training would entail when complete.

Visual Design

Do We Want the Future of Education to Actually Look Like “The Future?”

A big point of discussion for the team was the eventual visual design of the program itself. Early on, I had created some basic mock-ups to show the vision of what we could create for our stakeholders. These were, naturally, somewhat flashy and futuristic, glamorizing virtual reality as being full of infinite possibility. But we didn’t actually want to assume that a breathtaking vista or scifi cityscape was the best place for a technician to learn how to disassemble and repair a piece of hardware. In fact, it almost certainly wasn’t.

Development of the 3D environment was decided to be partially open-source based on our timeline for delivery, and although we had started building in a blank, grey room, numerous other designs were tested out with users. It was key to not only make sure that they thought it was immersive and not distracting, but that it rendered in a realistic way that didn’t impede the user’s actions in virtual space. Lighting and shading optimization within the framework became an essential part of ensuring usability for the entire program.

The Final Design

Introducing Virtual Reality Technician Training

In an age where we are infinitely connected with one another, the limitations of the physical world still weigh in. But virtual reality is quickly covering the distance, making the physical and virtual closer than ever.

The VR technician training developed by our team eliminates the need for massive, heavy hardware and rare experts to fly around the globe and educate groups of users one-on-one, multiple times a year. Instead, a ready-loaded headset with the most recent hardware training lets technicians learn the latest tips and lessons on their own schedule and implement what they’ve learned in the field the very next day.

Best of all, they can refresh their training whenever they like: making them able to become even better at their job than ever before. With global, instant access to the next level of education, agents are empowered to do better work for their customers, and save everyone time and money doing so.