SpeechBubbles

Inspiration

Have you ever had a feeling of thoughts being trapped in your head?

This is something everyone on our team related to so we created an augmented reality app where your phone acts as an outlet to spatialize your thoughts. Our simple audio recording mechanic is the foundation of a platform that lets people contextualize information in more visceral experience.

We created an augmented reality to get your thoughts out into the world. Are you a spatial thinker? Are you passionate about educational tools? Don't you wish your husband would remember to get the milk? This project takes notecard plotting to the next level with audio-based bubbles in 3D, AR space. Situated somewhere between mind-mapping, visualizing systems, placing spatial reminders, sequencing tasks, compositing music, planning events, social media, and brainstorming ideas, this app is prototypical of the next generation of design and visualization tools.

What it does

SpeechBubbles represents individual notes as bubbles floating in space. By pressing and holding the main button, you can record audio, creating a bubble whose size represents the length of the clip. Sticking your device into the bubble plays the audio file. You can move bubbles, delete bubbles, change their colors, and sequence bubble audio.

How we built it

We designed the application's interaction in Framer, animated and developed in Unity with the ARKit plugin, and modeled, prototyped, and iterated on assets in Maya and Adobe Creative Suite.

Challenges we ran into

The big challenge is testing Unity project on mobile devices. Working in a team with no Unity expert.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created an iPhone application which allows the user to annotate their thoughts by recording audio and a bubble will be generated. Later they can come back to the location and listen to the audio saved in the bubble.

What we learned

We learned how to work with ARKit and Unity to create AR.

What's next for SpeechBubbles

Social Map Thoughts Whenever you have thoughts, you can create a bubble and then pin it to the location in map you want and set the privacy to the people you want to see those bubbles.

Tagging Thoughts You can add tags to your bubble thoughts and people can look up bubble thoughts using the tags.

Future implementations will also include connecting bubbles with toggleable lines, different forms of spatial triggers such as bounding boxes or door frames, content analysis, temporary bubbles with expiration timers, and other accessibility features.