As a member of Hack@Brown’s executive board, I used Unity and Vuforia to create the AR@Brown app, providing an Augmented Reality experience for the hackers.

Every participating hacker is given a wooden name tag, both designed and laser-cut by myself and my team. Using AR@Brown app, the hackers can turn their name tags into a floating 3D bear’s paw, or view the Hackathon’s schedule without going into the website.

Interaction Designer & UX Engineer
Sep 2017 - Jun 2018
Jiaju Ma, Josh Roy, Eddie Jiao, Anika Sharma
Vuforia, Unity, Rhinoceros 3D, Laser Cutting

1. Every year Hack@Brown makes name tags for participating hackers. Doing so requires a lot of materials, but the usage of name tags is rather limited.

2. Projects that require additional hardware, like Virtual or Augmented Reality, are not popular because many hackers have no prior experience with hardware.

3. Our team wants to find a way to utilize the name tags in a more meaningful way and promote the popularity of hardware hacks.

In order better understand the participating hackers and make Hack@Brown a better experience for everyone, our team started with putting ourselves in the shoes of the hackers. We then identified the problems that we want to address and used iterative design process to produce solutions.

1. Hackers are more likely to do hardware hack if there are demo projects or tutorials available.

2. Marker Based Augmented Reality is suitable for beginners. We can use the designs of name tag as image markers to create an Augmented Reality demo app that can give more functionality to the name tags.

Upon opening the app, hackers have two options: either to view a 3D model of bear’s paw, created from Hack@Brown’s logo, or to view the schedule. The patterns on name tags become image markers, making the name tags a medium to experience Augmented Reality and also a tool to obtain useful information.