Mixing two projects, BBVA ‘Bank of the Future’ and The Centre for Industrial Technological Development, allowed us to examine how augmented reality can be used in interaction design projects, and provided the perfect chance for us to create best practice guidelines.
The realisation that two projects running simultaneously would benefit from each other was a real light bulb moment.
The BBVA (a multinational Spanish banking group) project, Bank of the Future, was focused on exploring their customer-centric vision, pushing for a seamless experience for their customers. Exploring augmented reality applications was the best option, and they wanted to test some concepts through an application that would be used by visitors at the BBVA Innovation Centre, collect feedback, learn and then put this experience to use in a real-life application.
The second project was for The Centre for Industrial Technological Development (CDTI), an R&D project aimed at defining the architecture, protocols, and standards of the future 3D internet, with a particular focus on 3D visualisation, virtual worlds, and user interactions.
They were a perfect match. In the ‘Bank of the Future’ project, the application will used the iPad as a platform, and will simulate future relationships between clients and banks using an augmented reality system to guide clients through a specific environment such as the BBVA Innovation Centre building.
“We are glad to have a visual guide that we can use both as a reference tool and as an inspirational token. I say, all in all, we had fun with Designit in this project”. Marcelo Soria, BBVA Innovation Manager.
The amalgamated project meant that we could create a video for Hybrid Days – a virtual congress that embraces the hybrid society where theory and actions are developed in a middle point between virtual and physical – and participate in a session there entitled ‘Augmented Reality. Theory and Practice’. It was a great chance to share our knowledge, and pass on the enthusiasm we had recently gained after such an eye-opening moment.
All the knowledge Virtual Spain provided to the project for the BBVA, let Designit create some guidelines that any designer could use on a similar situation. Four best practices:
- Know the technology you are going to work with. The more you know, the more prepared you will be.
- Use 3D with perspective. Two dimensions give us the possibility of creating high quality elements without overloading the systems.
- Don’t try to create realistic avatars. Probably its quality won’t be enough to create a proper interaction experience, and it will be too heavy for the system.
- This kind of application is continuously working recognizing the environment. What if the system stops working? If it is too slow? One animation can be enough to inform the user what is happening.
All the work has been enormously productive. The exchange of knowledge between theory and practice has to be present in every single project.
“We have been able to link two different projects to create a new one with a huge potential, so it is something we intend to repeat in the future”. Daniel Yuste, Managing Partner at Designit.