Life as a Gym (AR/VR Concept)
Creating a new exercise experience using AR/VR Technology
Don’t feel like reading through everything? Check out the Final Prototype!
Problem Statement & Background:
Finding time to exercise and maintain our physical health is a challenge all of us face. College students in particular are often so busy trying to balance their school, work, and social life, that exercises becomes less and less of a priority. As a matter of fact, 40-50% of all college students fail to hit recommended exercise goals. We wanted to examine this problem further, and see if we could find ways to improve exercise amongst adults and college students.
Investigating the Problem Using UX Research:
Survey about Health and Exercise
To better understand why college students aren’t getting enough exercise, we decided to turn to creating a survey. Surveys allowed us to reach a broad audience and record a large amount of responses to help us gain a holistic understanding of the issues and challenges college students face.
Survey Goals:
Learn what types of exercise college students do
Discover barriers preventing students from exercising
Find out what motivates college students to exercise
Key Data We Gathered
What types of exercise do you typically do?
What resources do you use to learn new exercises
What barriers prevent you from exercising?
What motivates you to exercise?
Survey Key Findings
Not Enough Time to Exercise
The majority of people who took our survey indicated they either didn’t have enough time, or had other things going on which prevented them from exercising
People Exercise for a Variety of Reasons
Students had a wide variety of reasons for why they wanted/did exercise, with the top reasons revolving around health and appearance
Proper Guidance is Often Needed
Various reference materials were often used by our participants to ensure they were doing exercises correctly
Endurance and Strength Exercises are Popular
Endurance exercise such as walking and running, as well as strength exercises like lifting weights were seen as the most popular ways to exercise
Diary Studies
Diary studies are a way to collect consistent data throughout a period of time by sending respondents some type of form to fill out on a daily or sometimes more frequent basis. We chose this type of research because we wanted to see how people's behaviors and motivations change from day-to-day when it comes to exercising. The diary study also helped us learn more about topics which cannot easily be tackled in a survey, due to the open-ended nature of the questions. Below is an example of the form we sent to respondents, and some of the data we received from our diary study.
Diary Study Findings
The Experience Revolves Around Kids
Even though many of the people observed were families; kids tended to dictate the entire trip. Deciding where to go, what to see, and for how long
Kids are Independent
Kids went anywhere they wanted while in the museum, often times getting away from their parents or other groups to go and explore
Museums Have Sensitive Subjects
Museum exhibits that contained more sensitive information such as Slavery, War, and Death were always accompanied by parental explanations and questions
Designing a New Solution!
Ideation Based on our Research
The ideation process for this project was especially difficult because there are so many potential ways to solve the problem of increasing exercise. To create our new project proposals, we took all of the data we gathered from our diary studies and survey, and highlighted some of the key factors that appeared in both. These key factors included time management, endurance and strength training, and the need for guidance during exercise.
Top 3 Ideas Emerge!
After creating over 50 ideas, we needed to compare each idea against the criteria we previously established to see how well or poorly they met each. Examining each idea and talking about their strengths and weaknesses, helped us narrow down to three potential design concepts, they were:
Smart Exercise Mat
AR/VR Glasses
Exercise Form Corrector
The Final Selection - AR/VR Glasses
After much deliberation, we decided to go with the Interactive Toy Companion; we felt idea was not only a fun and unique way to make a museum feel more interactive, but also something which could be applied to a wide variety of museum, types, unlike several of the other ideas.
Paper Prototyping via User Enactments
Once we narrowed down to one idea, we needed to figure out how on earth we were going to start creating a prototype for this concept. We thought it would be a good idea to start with paper prototyping since we didn’t have any experience working in AR/VR, and we paired our prototyping with user enactments to try and see if this concept had any merit.
Prototyping and Enactment Goals
Create paper prototypes tha lay out exercise tasks
Try to imagine how this concept would work in the real world
Learn if users are comfortable with what is being asked of them
User Enactment Pictures
Synthesizing the Findings
Paper Prototype & Enactment Findings
People Wouldn’t Use This
We learned pretty quickly that our initial AR/VR concept wasn’t working well. Users felt dumb trying to do the tasks we asked in real life
Voice Input Was Preferred
During the enactments, we asked how users would expect to control the experience, and the majority immediately resorted to using their voice
Solo Exercises Only
Nobody would ever consider wearing glasses like this when in a group setting, they would only utilize the exercise capabilities if they were alone.
Prototype V2 and Idea Changes
After our complete failure during the user enactments, we decided to re-focus our efforts on a new approach. We eliminated any aspects of vigorous exercise, and instead focused purely on creating the ideal walking experience with built in navigation and simple biomentrics.
New Prototype Goals
Focus on the walking experience
Give users choices for what they do and don’t do
Keep it simple - don’t overwhelm users with information
Prototyping Screenshots
Let Users Choose What They Do
Instead of trying to force users into exercising, we present them with various choices as they walk, in this example, the glasses have detected some stairs and are offering them as a challenge to the user; while also displaying how many calories they’d burn and how long it would take
Refreshed Design Goals - Keep It Simple
Our initial view focused on a few simple elemements, the current time, how much time is left until your next appointment, how long you’ve been walking, and how many calories you’ve burned
Summarizing Progress
At the end of any activities, users can see a simple summary of everything they did during their walk including how many calories they burned, and what activities they participated in
Offer Different Routes to Users
When users let us know where they want to go, we can provide them with various choices on how to get there. Each route shown will also display the duration and calories burned, making it easy for users to decide what they want to do
Adding a Mobile App
One thing we learned during our user enactments is that users would prefer to use their phone to help interface with the AR/VR glasses; so we wanted to make a companion application which enabled some essential fitness features that our users could take advantage of
App Goals
Connect to AR/VR Glasses and track information
Display simple information such as distance and calories without needing to use the glasses
Help track progress over time
App Image Gallery
Reflections
Life as a Gym AR/VR glasses is the perfect way to demonstrate that not everything goes well all the time when you’re trying to solve a problem. We had to hard pivot several times during this design process because our ideas were shot down or simply not wanted by the users we tested with. In the end, I still think our solution has a lot of room to grow and improve; but I think it would also be best to explore other avenues, as this doesn’t seem like a viable product these days.