The Focus Field

user persona
people with ADHD and autism are generally uncomfortable with sustained eye contact
Augmented visual cues help cue users meet goals that they've set.
Radiating rings emanating from the point of focus (the other person's eyes) to help redirect their attention back to the focus target.
Users set goals and monitor their progress using the mobile app.
Live data from the Hololens is synced to the user's account, using Azure services.
Our tools include Unity, Hololens 2, MRTK, Photoshop, Illustrator, Rhino, and Azure
We use Azure to sync information from the headset to a user's personal profile, allowing for more data analytics.
The data from multiple sessions is aggregated and displayed for the users on their account.
Our Team

Inspiration

Our team was sitting in the audience at the Opening Ceremonies of the Reality Hack 2020, after a long and exciting day of meeting people and attending workshops. Though the keynotes were amazing, one of our group members found it hard to focus. Her attention would wander amidst the visual cacophony of phones, people making comments, and other bystanders. At this moment, she wondered if she could make something to help maintain her focus with augmented reality. The Focus Field was thus conceived.

What it does

The Focus Field encourages and rewards sustained attention by providing augmented visual cues and filters in response to a user's eye movements.

How we built it

We built this in pieces with each team member fleshing out individual features and testing them to see if they worked. We gradually merged our different portions together.

Challenges we ran into

None of us had ever developed for Hololens before and there was a lot of initial learning and head-scratching. We gained many findings from our testing with users on autism and ADHD that challenged our original project direction.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of.. eye-tracking and creating a feature-complete vertical slice of our product. Creating graphics and high fidelity mobile prototype that completes the user's flow with our app. Getting Azure services to work so that the Hololens 2 device would send live data to the cloud. Working iteratively and testing as much as we could with mentors.

What we learned

How to work with MRTK and Hololens 2. Working with Azure Cloud. Working and designing for use of eye-tracking. Learning about ADHD and autism.

What's next for The Focus Field

Creating The Focus Field at this hackathon allowed us to have a proof of concept and testable demo to share with a larger and more diverse set of users.

Built With

adobe-illustrator
augmented-reality
augmentedreality
azure
eyetracking
figma
github
microsoft-hololens
mrtk
photoshop
premiere
rhino
unity

Submitted to

MIT Reality Hack 2020

Created by

I worked on a project (.NET Standard) that could be plugged in to unity to upload data to the cloud (Azure Blob Service). Specifically the data was recording what was in focus and for how long.

I also worked on a project that could grab the data from the blob and perform analytics on it. Analytics include; graphs, and timelines. This could be extended to figure out which objects are bad for your focus. Data from many people could be use to create profiles for specific mental illnesses (e.g. ADHD). These profiles could be used to diagnose other people.

I explored the use of Azure Functions for performing analysis entirely on the cloud.

Calvin Fong
I worked with my team on designing and prototyping the product. I helped iterate on the UX design to create an accessible and user friendly flow. I used Unity to implement and iterate on the mechanics that take full advantage of the vision tracking capabilities of the HoloLens 2.

Tibi Leonov
AR/VR UX designer
I mostly worked on architectural view of the product from the ideation of the idea to the development of the product. I worked on integrating various segments of our project such as Face detection , Object detection and using the data to analyse the performance of users . How better they are progressing in their work . I made a neural network model which I trained with the data of my fellow team members and we had one person with ADHD , I took his data as positive data and other four team member data as negative one . Further I gathered data from different teams . For making my model not be biased with negative cases , I programatically made test cases so we are feeding the unbiased data to our model using many parameters as inputs from various eye movements , change in size of pupil , change in tensions of eye skin and many more .

Harman Bhutani
Machine Learning | Business Intelligence | AI
Together with Anne-Elise, I focused on design direction and project management. We specified the user story and created the UX flow, including the interface assets. Testing various filter effects and colour schemes on the Hololens 2, I designed the logo and branding to suit both the AR tool and the companion phone app.

Ahn Mur
Designer
I tag-teamed working in Unity, writing code to work with eye tracking, integrating different libraries, and bug fixing, Additionally, I worked with team members to map and test user stories and flow, and create graphics to display on the Hololens 2 as well as our mobile prototype. Our group worked collectively to test and collect feedback from users.

Anne-Elise Chung
VR/AR Designer / Developer