Augmented Reality application

Lana-
AR assistant

Lana, an Augmented Reality assistant aims at providing user with motivation to work and manage time effectively. The AR assistant organizes your tasks for 3 hours. The application encourages the user to engage in productive activities and improves the user's motivation to work and complete their work.

Market Research

AR technology has changed the way we interact with each other. For example, using AR telepresence and virtual humans(VHs). Virtual humans are typically human-like computer visual representations. They may appear in a virtual setting or coexist in a real-world setting.​
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​My research has been heavily influenced by a fascinating study called YANA, Virtual Assistant to Support Home Office. The study revealed that YANA helped all the workers in an organization to effectively schedule their tasks and organize their time, while working remotely, giving them the impression that they were in a more controlled setting and reducing their anxiety about forgetting to complete an important task.

User Research

Before beginning the project, I conducted a survey in the initial stage of my study. To see the requirement of AR assistant in user's day to day life. 30 people participated.

  • More than 66% of respondents procrastinate constantly. If there are no deadlines, they also lack the motivation to begin working or to finish it on time.
  • More than 75% of people are not able to stick to their daily plans.
  • 80% of people have never used timers or AI applications like Alexa or Siri to plan there day or get started with work

I further conducted interviews with the target audience to understand their procrastination habits. As users are the best resource to gather what features would work best to achieve the goal, I asked users what helps them get motivated to work and what would their perfect AR application look like.

Relevant Features

  • Virtual humanoid
  • Text to speech- Amazon Polly (AWS)
  • Notification Manager and Motivational Feedback
  • Firebase Database system
  • Progress bar and Score Meter

Challenges

  • “Motivation provides a source of energy that is responsible for learners decision to make an effort, how hard they are going to pursue it, and how connected they feel to the activity”
  • A lack of motivation could be a major obstacle to learner success, and leads to procrastination and missed deadlines.
  • As planning tasks and staying on track can be difficult sometimes, and with the increase in distractions, the user requires a sense of accountability and assistance to achieve
    acquired goals. 

Design

  • User interfaces serve as the points of access through which users engage with designs. I chose the Graphical user interface (GUIs) format for user interaction. Where the user interacts with visual display on digital panels

  • Each color’s wavelength triggers a different set of emotions or mental processes because only a certain range of wavelengths is visible to the human eye. I chose colour orange as it has a calming impact on the body. It aids in improving mood.
  • My goal was to get users habitual to using the application and to make it as simple as possible, so they could use it in a single glance.a

Technical

  • Use of 3D character-The use of virtual animated humans with body and facial movements and other natural communication signals enhances human-computer interaction. It's important that the character can move around and adhere to the physical laws of the real world.

  • Firebase Database services- The Firebase Realtime Database is a cloud-hosted database. This cloud service synchronises data in real-time from every connected client user and stored as JSON.All of the consumers share a single Realtime Database instance and are automatically updated with the most recent data when cross-platform apps.
  • Text to Speech- I used Amazon's text-to-speech service, called Amazon Poly, to include this feature in my application.Amazon Polly TTS converts text to speech either by typing the text into the text field provided or by copying from an external document.
  • Notification system- Notifications have become a common method for grabbing users' attention, an uncontrolled surge of them is known to result in undesired interruptions. I took these findings into account and added a notification system that sends users an alert to remind them to start working after
    24 hours.

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