Find Your Design Faster by Designing in the Medium

Cover image created in ShapesXR and rendered in Blender

XR design is not a straightforward process. For every successful app or game out there, there are dozens of versions of that game that you never see. Creating an app for virtual or augmented reality means addressing challenges that are unique to those platforms. This requires experimenting with what does and what doesn’t work for your application in these new interactive mediums. And the faster you can get feedback and iterate, the more chance of success you will have.

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Customer Stories

At ShapesXR we’ve seen our customers move three to four times faster when they design inside the medium.

“Early iterations in ShapesXR allowed us to go into the production phase in 1/4 of the time” — Alexander Kals Head of Extended Reality, Antwerpes AG

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“With Shapes XR, our XR team can block out and test many variations of UI and UX in early stages that would be far too expensive or time consuming to try later with a full team of producers, 3D artists, designers and Unity developers involved.” — Jason Yim Founder & CEO, Trigger XR

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But why? What’s the magic that allows this much gain in productivity? The answer is simultaneous design and testing. This means the designer can experience something close to the final product while they are designing. So they can make dozens of revisions in a single session until it just feels right. No need to send the build to the device to see if the design works or not. What does this look like in practice?

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5 revisions in 15 seconds

In this example, you can see a designer inside ShapesXR trying out 5 different layouts as they place a menu. 

Traditionally the designer would make one option in Unity, hit play, put the headset on, see how it looks, then take the headset off and go back to the laptop for another revision. In ShapesXR the designer can try five different layouts even before dropping the image. 

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Test the comfort of 5 menus in 50 seconds

In this example, the designer is trying out 5 different places to attach a menu to the user’s hand to see which is the most comfortable. 

Because attaching the menu only works in play mode they set up the five menus orientations on different stages. For each orientation, they can make a few iterations while placing the menu. Then they can test the comfort of each during play mode, miming the interactions. One minute later they have a sense of what works and what doesn’t.

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Design social experiences while being social

In this example, the designer is crafting a virtual world. 

In virtual spaces like this one, you can support proximity-based conversations, where clusters of people can have their own conversations without everyone in the space hearing them. This is particularly hard to test iterate because you people together in a space to test it. But in a tool like ShapesXR the designer can invite a group into their virtual space and modify the audio settings and immediately see the impact on social dynamics. 

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Go forth and iterate!

As you design your next spatial app or game, look for ways to design and test simultaneously to find the right design faster.

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