How can you design an AR experience that is both functional and visually appealing?

Designing an augmented reality (AR) experience that is both functional and visually appealing requires a thoughtful combination of design principles, technical expertise, and user-centered considerations. Define Your Goals: Clearly define the purpose and goals of your AR experience. Know Your Audience: Understand your target audience and their preferences. Choose the Right AR Platform: Select the AR platform or framework that best suits your project, such as ARKit (iOS), ARCore (Android), Unity, or web-based AR. Consider the devices your audience will use. User-Centered Design: Follow user-centered design principles to create an intuitive and user-friendly AR interface.

These are good points. Also you can include a detailed story board and mood board to define the use journey and visual references before the designers can actually model them. This pre production phase can actually avoid a lot of reworks during production phase

For a broad audience, smartphones are beneficial, while headsets offer immersive experiences. Second, cost considerations are vital; specialized AR hardware is pricey compared to smartphones. Third, technical requirements like high-precision tracking may dictate the platform. Finally, the ecosystem and developer support, such as robust SDKs and large communities, can accelerate development.

Good points. Platform choice is also made based on the type of user engagement. 1:1 and 1: many interactions. For ex: Wearables and hand held devices give a personal 1:1 AR experience. Large scale projection AR provides a multiuser AR experience. This will suit for a large people gathering like events and shopping mall.

- Choice of colours is super important. For example if you are building the AR experience for a Wearable device like hololens or magic leap, black or dark shades has to be completely avoided. The holographic device cannot render black at all. - while designing 3D assets the total polycount and total number of materials has an upper limit based on the choice of platform. This is super important to have a smooth experience with low latency and good frame rates.

Here are some options to consider for AR optimization: - Load Balancing: Offload complex tasks like 3D model rendering to the cloud, keeping simpler tasks like 2D overlays on the device. - Adaptive Quality: Automatically reduce graphic quality in real-time if performance metrics like frame rate drop below certain levels. - Content Prioritization: Focus on optimizing key elements, letting less crucial elements have lower quality. - Network Optimization: Use efficient protocols like WebSocket for real-time data to minimize latency. - Asynchronous Loading: Load secondary assets in the background to ensure a seamless experience.

Currently what's picking up pace is remote streaming of AR content. Entire processing and rendering happens on a powerful remote server and the frames are streamed to any devices. This provides a realistic experience and rich content can be streamed into mobile devices and Wearables. These are impossible on the devices otherwise.