Using ShapesXR to Design Spatial Learning Experiences

About Prisms and the challenge

Prisms VR is an ed-tech startup that creates virtual reality experiences for teaching high school STEM subjects. The experiences developed are a combination of immersive stories, games and interactive content that allows students to learn abstract concepts through meaningful discovery and tactile exploration. The team works continuously on new modules every week through a design and development iteration process that poses two main challenges:

- Subject matter expert (SME) and designers have to translate pedagogical objectives into an immersive and easy to use experience.

- The designs and interactions have to be effectively communicated to developers to prevent miscommunication, reworks and ultimately delays in the project.

Design and communication with ShapesXR

ShapesXR has served as a key communication tool between curriculum developers, designers and the product team. By transferring the initial drawings and whiteboard sketches into ShapesXR we created a wide variety of concepts leveraging the extensive creative toolset available. A few hours were enough to feel proficient with everything that was needed and regardless of their 3D skills team members were able to  join synchronously and asynchronous co-creation and design review sessions held in ShapesXR. Thanks to the stage system we were also able to create clear storyboards for user flows and user interactions that we turned into animated GIFs and added as standard deliverables in our design documents to developers. Some of the spatial user interfaces, environments, and user interactions prototyped in ShapesXR can be seen on the side.