Effortless AR Prototyping
The wiARframe Manifesto
I’m currently launching an Augmented Reality startup but it’s not the one I had intended. I made a pivot, not because of a revelation from customers but because something I was trying to do required more effort than I thought it should, so I decided I should fix that problem first. The problem is prototyping AR Apps.
September 2017, I’m a participant on EFSG2, the second cohort of EntrepreneurFirst in Singapore — a startup builder backed by some of the world’s best investors. It’s one month into the programme and I’m pitching an ambitious AR EdTech idea to one of the best schools in Singapore. They like what they hear but with AR seeing really is believing, so I agree to go away and make a quick prototype.
The following day, I open up Unity to start coding but laziness kicks in, I love Unity but I can’t be bothered to install plugins, setup scenes, make builds and all the other stuff I’d need to do just to get started. So I looked around, there are tools to let me load 3D Models into AR, some tutorials on using 360 images to achieve something similar, but where was the Invision for AR? It didn’t exist, and so enlisting the help of Stuart Varrall, I decided to make it. It’s called wiARframe and this is what you can expect.
Designer Experience Focussed
I told a developer friend of mine that I was going to build a prototyping tool for AR, they said, ‘isn’t that Unity?’… ‘No’, is the answer.
Apps like Invision and Marvel allow designers to create clickable prototypes for web and mobile ideas quickly and without coding. This is valuable because it allows rapid iteration of concepts, and one might argue that the speed at which we iterate is a good indicator of the quality of the final product.
WiARframe is being built in the spirit of lightweight web and mobile design tools. It will follow the paradigms that most designers are already familiar with and (where possible) avoid introducing the complexity you’d get with a games engine. How is this possible? We use sensible defaults.
We’re making a lot of choices on your behalf, like the light sources in the scene, the shaders used to render 3D Models, and handling the real world scale of the scene. Yes, this reduces your control but for a prototype, we think speed and ease of use are more important.
Btw, this tool is also for developers, I am one after all. Our objective is simply to remove the need for code or complex 3D user interfaces, something which is useful for anyone prototyping.
AR First (& Only)
My developer friend didn’t ask me, but someone no doubt will be thinking, ‘Aren’t existing code-free App prototyping tools good enough?’… ‘No’, is the answer.
When outlining above how we’re able to keep the tool simple, I attributed it to sensible defaults, and trying to come up with sensible defaults that work for everything and for everyone is impossible.
WiARframe is ‘effortless AR prototyping’, anything which doesn’t bring us closer to that goal, we will avoid. We won’t support prototyping websites and mobile apps or even VR, we don’t want the clutter.
That being said, could you still use wiARframe for VR prototyping? Yes, you could, but our product direction will be guided by AR. Whilst AR and VR may be similar now, once they mature I believe they’re going to become completely different types of experiences and it will be impossible for a single solution to effectively serve both.
Our initial focus is even more specific: Mobile AR. We’re starting with ARKit compatible devices, followed by ARCore compatible devices soon after. In the future, we will probably look to support dedicated AR devices like HoloLens and MagicLeap.
A Learing Journey
My friend Stuart asked me, ‘what gestures shall we support?’… ‘I don’t know’, is the answer.
The exciting thing about emerging technologies like AR is that we don’t have a design language for them yet. On web and mobile we know the gestures, the hovers, the clicks, the swipes, the pinches, but in AR this is yet to truly be discovered. We’re making assumptions and will be experimenting with different functionality, but ultimately, for users of wiARframe, the best behaviors will be just a tick box away.
The possibilities for AR are endless and ideas will evolve as the medium does. Accordingly, our goal is for wiARframe to evolve with AR and the demands of our users. That’s why we’re launching our Beta now. The product is far from polished but it’s developed as far as it can without continuous user feedback. So if you’re interested in Effortless AR Prototyping then sign up for the Beta now and join us on this Journey.
