Comments

Inspiration

Gen-Z grew up in online communities: niche forums, multiplayer games, social media platforms. In doing so, this generation was socialized in an environment where communication is optional, low-pressure, asynchronous, and focused around shared ideals, likes, and goals. Now go ahead and throw that kid into a traditional “Third Place” where communication is unstructured, relatively unincentivized, and uncomfortable by all metrics they are familiar with – see what happens! Unsurprisingly, this chaotic mismatch between online and spontaneous in-person activity leads people our age to feel disconnected from their local communities. Almost half of the undergraduate students that we surveyed in our user research stage answered strongly that they felt “Disconnected” from their community, with only 1 of 22 students feeling “Connected.” We aim to bridge the gap between online and in-person “Third Places” by starting conversations around physical points of interest with the familiar anonymous and asynchronous features of online forums. Inspired by singleplayer games with online communication features like Pokemon GO and the Nintendo 3DS’s StreetPass, we present an online communication platform based in the real world.

What it does

Comments is a theoretical native application for wearable XR devices like the Ray-ban Meta AI Glasses that allows users to place anonymous textual notes anywhere in the world. Whether they were inspired by a sight, have something to share about the area, or just have a loose thought to throw into the void, anyone can leave a thought behind to be revisited or happened upon by a stranger. Users will come across notes from other users, which they can like or reply to. To avoid creating more chaos and visual clutter, clusters of many notes in a point of interest will be displayed in small groups which can be cycled between. Notes are served to users via an algorithm alike to social media platforms, with newer, more popular notes being shown more frequently and vice versa. Similar to “bookmarking” features in browser apps and social media platforms, users can pin notes that they like to guarantee they will see them when revisiting a location.

How we designed and prototyped it

Early in our ideation process, we all found a fascination in the disappearance of traditional Third Places as an interesting problem to tackle. We gained inspiration by analyzing Nintendo StreetPass and Pokemon GO – two games loved by our team that use physical space as a playing field and have asynchronous messaging aspects. We found that both games focused communication around the people involved rather than places. We decided on creating a platform where users post their thoughts to a location to mirror the dynamic of posting to forums and channels that is experienced conventionally in social media platforms. We also utilized Notability and Google Gemini during our ideation process to summarize our meeting notes. Riffing off of the Designathon’s theme of outer space, we decided that stars would be a fitting theme for our UI. By creating constellations of replies, we clearly define the relationship between notes in an area. We knew from the beginning that we wanted to build a prototype in Figma, but quickly realized that Figma alone would not be able to capture the physical element of the project. We looked into using Unity and ShapesXR with the Meta Quest 2 to create an XR prototype, but ran into hardware limitations that wouldn’t allow us to share the vision we had for the project. Finally, we decided on splitting our prototype into two key components: a video created in Adobe After Effects demonstrating the platform at work complemented with a Figma prototype to interactively test the interface.

Challenges & Accomplishments

The team is generally new to designing for XR platforms, which was a difficult but exciting challenge! Furthermore, we experimented with unfamiliar software outside of Figma for prototyping, like ShapesXR and Adobe After Effects. Despite having to learn a lot on the job, we are all incredibly proud of what we’ve been able to create this weekend!

What's next for Comments

We’d like to create more options on the platform for community building and customization. For example, being able to create posts advertising public events in more official ways than just leaving a note with details. To foster more individuality, we’d also like to add options for users to customize their notes’ colors, fonts, and borders.