Augmented
Cyclist

Design Lead
Intel, New Devices Group
2015

Disclaimer: The majority of work for this project remains under NDA.

How might an urban cyclist use mixed reality glasses? While our team was exploring use cases and interaction modalities for mixed reality hardware, stakeholders asked us to develop and prototype ideas for cycling.

Challenges

Because previous work had been done around sport cycling, and because we felt learnings from a more practical version of the use case would be more universally applicable, we chose to focus on commuter/casual cycling. In addition to researching ergonomics and hardware feasibility, we’d be able to learn about wayfinding, social engagement, and more robust set of safety requirements, among other things.

Approach

With such a broad set of topics, we triaged and explored based on their potential for valuable learnings. We asked all the questions we could think of, identified obstacles and opportunities, and established hypotheses and ways to test them. Despite our limitations in a lab settings, our workflow was very focused on prototyping, testing, and iteration. We prototyped using everything from paper (and transparencies) to third party and proprietary hardware. Research included field studies and interviews with real world users and subject matter experts.

Outcome

In the end we had a functional prototype developed on proprietary hardware, a set of learnings, test results, and benchmarks  that informed future product and SOC roadmaps, and potentially valuable IP in the space. Additionally, having shaped the use case to inform broader applications, we were able to quickly (~3 weeks) pivot our prototype into a demo for an in-car use case in response to business development needs.